On 13th June 2000 *DAMN was founded and quickly there was a demand for a website that should become the largest
Rainbow Six Mac website worldwide a few months later but back to the start:
Bander didn't have any experience with html so it was up to me to make the *DAMN website with my great web experience. I have created ONE mountain bike trial website earlier but that was it. Well the way is the aim, so I started and played around with free javascript templates. Once online the website got great feedback only the point that it was Internet Explorer only was a great flaw. Soon I started to improve the website daily and I spent more time working with html tags than to play Rainbow Six. That was the price I had to pay for becoming the #1 among all R6 sites
One complete redesign followed another but only with the 4th *DAMN website version I have managed to make the *DAMN site Netscape compatible and introduced cgi scripts the first time(thanks to the hosting services of planetrainbowsix). The first forum went online a little bit earlier after I discovered the *POD forum and thought I need this too. I have to admit I simply ripped wrath's idea. Well it wasn't that bad or you couldn't read this. Before I introduced the newspro system in august 2001 I really made every website update manually using SimpleText and later BBEdit. What a horrible work...
However the main reason why I introduced cgi was the reason that I had to join the Army in september 2001 and I couldn't force my great *DAMN staff to update my site manually so I integrated the reason and it wasn't a bad idea. The complete website except the forum and BL are still running on a very strong modified Newspro system.
I have made a screenshot of the start page of each version:
Can you remember the tons of great background midis!? FAtboyslim's "Right Here right now" at the start page or James Bond at the Downloads section. Used 13th June 2000 - September 2000
First redesign: Battle League can now be accessed from the start page and we aren't a clan-only website anymore. Used September 2000 - April 2001
Few months after we got hosted by Planetrainbowsix I redesigned the site but it wasn't very successful: too many confusing links and graphics. As a consequence the site got only used from April 2001 - August 2001
4th redesign: A revolution compared to the previous versions. Design was 80 percent Netscape compatible and well accepted by the community. The only flaw was that the site had to many subsections. Nevertheless used from August 2001 - December 2002
The latest redesign. Crisp & clear. I tried to make the site easier to navigate and also redid the Download section. Site is now 100percent NS/Mozilla compatible and furthers currently over 50percent are using another browser than IE. The Mac community thinks different
Due GR I renamed the site from *DAMN R6/RS World to *DAMN R6. Used from December 2002 - I don't know... I only know for sure that the next redesign will use a complete selfwritten php backbone(maybe even a selfdeveloped forum).
If you imagine that I really had almost 0(ZERO) html knowledge I have done pretty much out of it
Happy Anniversary,
Mauti
ps.: thanks to the admin of MacOps - R6(*sorry I forgot your name*) who allowed me to use his table html codes after the closed MacOps in august 2000. MacOps was the largest and coolest R6 site at this time!