Had a little trawl on the wayback machine and found this beauty from 1998 – the first commercial website I worked on. Okay so it’s pretty ugly but I am still proud of working on this baby. When web development was a lot more brute force. There were no editors or IDEs and you had to ftp everything.
My duties were creating the beautiful graphics you see before you, hand coding HTML in notepad, creating adverts in gif form and uploading them as per an enormous spreadsheet and not to mention the evils of early days javascript
Tables were the order of the day, because, well, you couldn’t actually get a design to hang together without them and often times all text was in gif form – oh the lack of accessibility and of course we wouldn’t do that now. Oh and iframes, I sincerely apologise but there may well have been an iframe or two knocking around this site.
And with this new online technology comes animation, just check out how dynamic this gif is, it really does show Auto Trader to be a modern online presence.
As you will have guessed this is the search form, I have no idea who decided green for the extra bits. The back end for the search, if I remember correctly, was all done by one chap, Greg, the guy was a bit of a genius. The one issue we did have with it though was that it couldn’t differentiate between the manufacturer Seat and the fact a car had seats because it was essentially doing a text search across flat files.
So to us now this looks like I’ve been on a bit of a mission to collect the greatest in retro tech from ebay, but no! you would be wrong. What we have here is a lot of very expensive equipment… it could even render images in lightroom ( a 3D package) at quite a pace. Auto Trader were not stingy when it came to equipment – you couldn’t lug it home to work from home. I don’t think we went home much as we generally played Quake in the evenings.