I never claimed to know anything about online marketing – or the web for that matter. In fact when I used to do marketing plans for clients prior to starting RedBalloon, of noticeable absence was any mention of ‘the web’. So you tell me why I thought it was a great idea to launch a dot.com after the dot.com crash especially when I knew nothing about it.

(Nothing like a steep learning curve to keep you focussed)

So here it is a screen shot of the first disaster of a web site. Apart from the fact that the site was red with black writing (oh that was easy to read – not) the whole site was framed, so you could never find an experience again (pretty sure we had no search function either). We had one of those landing pages where the only text that appears said ? ?Click here to enter?. Really useful for search engines.

I was once sharing this disaster at a speaking engagement and I often ask the question ‘did anybody see the site when we launched?’ And usually no hands go up. This day one did – but I chose to ignore it. Afterwards I asked the guy if he really had seen the site (because we didn’t really have many customers back then – I almost knew all of our visitors on a first name basis) He replied ‘Yes, I was studying multimedia at the time at UTS, and my lecturer bought your website in as an example of the WORST website he had ever seen’. Glad I didn’t ask for that response during the session.

Anyway here it is – ugly and useless as it was. (we are now on the 5th version of the site – with some spectacular things planned for the 6th) I?ve learned that development is a journey not a destination.