Poke-Manía

Old-style website I created when I was ten

My Pokemon website as it would have looked in 2003

About the project

Creation date: 2001
Technologies: HTML + Copy-pasted Javascript code that I didn't understand

This website, which I created in 2001, when I was ten, started as a personal site – at the very beginning, it even showcased a scanned picture of myself. However, after just a couple of months of constant updates (I was obsessed with it!), it ended up mutating into a Pokemon website that I decided to call "Poke-Manía".

The content of the site made absolutely no sense, and it was a total mess, as I would add new sections chaotically whenever I felt like it. Plus, in case the total lack of structure and organisation wasn't bad enough, the writing was also atrociously bad and nonsensical. I guess ten-year-old me had very low standards.

Nonetheless, I managed to gather a decent amount of traffic over the years, at least for the standards of the time, as I improved the SEO of the site by applying what I would learn about SEO from an older cousin and from my own research. I even managed to "make" some money by showing adverts, although none of the advertisement "companies" ever paid me what they owed me – the internet truly was a wild, lawless place back in the day.

Finally, I remember that a computer magazine from South America sent my father an email to talk about the site. Specifically, they asked him for permission to write about me and my website in their next issue, as they were impressed with the fact that a ten-year-old had created a website – even though I am sure I was far from being the only one! In any case, I have never seen or found the magazine, but I do remember that in their email they called me "webmastercito" ("little webmaster" in English), which I thought was pretty cool.

How it looked

Some of the assets are gone for good, so this screenshot has been partially "faked". In any case, this is very close to how the website would have looked back in 2003, with the caveat that most images (and some of the text) were animated:

The initial version, from 2001, was a little bit different though. For example, in the first version, the introductory text said something like "Hi, my name is Julio, I am 10 years old and I have decided to create my own Pokemon website". But the thing is, when I became eleven the following year, I had to manually update the website to match my new age, which I thought was annoying. So, to skip these yearly updates, I decided to simply change the text and write that "I was born in 1990", as you can see in the screenshot.

I probably thought I was being clever here, however, I took this strategy too far: around the same time, I also updated the original explanations about Pokemon to make it seem like the Pokemon phenomenon was a thing of the past, as I thought that the trend would be over soon. Of course, I couldn't have been more wrong!