There are very few people who have been with Woolie’s World from the very beginning, back with X10Hosting. I can only think of 3 in fact, Ben (Woodsup), Aaron (afmanuk) and Adam. As you will probably remember the site had no direction or purpose in the first few versions. The site simply served as a sandbox to experiment with my “design skills”. I would create many versions of Woolie.co.uk (as it wasn’t called Woolie’s World at the time), but only a few would be shown public. So basically, the site hasn’t changed 
The first taste I got for running a website was when Ben and I had the SkoolPortal (skoolportal.tk) forums. Again, only about 6 of you will probably remember that. It was basically a simple forum we had going for the students of Melbourn Village College. It consisted mainly of teacher bashing and general chat, however it was an excellent community, and I strive to have the same thing going on here some day (getting there). Unfortunatly the company that hosted the SkoolPortal forums (it was a free host) deleted them as it was inactive for a while (the buzz had died off).
On this page, I hope to take you on a trip down memory lane. If there are no memories of Woolie’s World for you, then perhaps this will enlighten you to how the site grew. Please take note that you can click on all the images for an actual view of the page.
1st Version
Although not strictly being the first version, this was the first version I uploaded for public viewing. Also take note that although the site was advertised as Woolie.co.uk, the domain wasn’t actually registered for the first few versions.
2nd Version
This has to be the most vibrant and awful layout you’ve ever seen in your life right? It doesn’t look so bad in the little image below, however just click on the image and view the overly large sized web page.
3rd Version
In this one I started experimenting with Flash (see the pretty toolbar advert). I also started moving away from Dreamweaver (see the “only HTML” part :). In this version, there was still no real website, it just consisted of a phpBB forum install, a 4images gallery, a page of links and games. No page looked the same as the other either. But slowly getting better.
4th Version
Ah, a first try with IFrames. It was quite a special moment for me, being able to have a file inside another. Again, there is no real purpose to the website. Some of the links up the top are for our clan site we had at the time (involving phpNuke, ouch), and the SkoolPortal website that I was trying to start up again.
5th Version
This was when the site was starting to take shape as a graphic design site, you know, signatures and stuff. Pretty boring really but it was the only thing I could think of. If you’re wondering where I got the inspiration for this design, I have no idea, I’m quite ashamed of the crazy frog sitting in the middle of the header.
6th Version
Another milestone in the Woolie’s World history. Between this version and the last, I had purchased a reseller hosting package from IxelHost and had learnt how to design websites using tables (you’ll probably find a tutorial somewhere that looks similar to this version’s design). I had also established it as a design business, although I would have shat myself if a customer had actually came.
7th Version
After a little bit of research and looking around other similar websites, I came up with this more sophisticated version. I feel this was a large improvement on the last one.
8th Version
After realising that I could generate a lot of traffic by supplying tutorials of an Adobe Photoshop nature, I decided to have a little sub site (woolie.co.uk/personal I think it was) that I could use to give these tutorials. I submitted one tutorial using this layout, and I got lots and lots of hits from Good-Tutorials. This is where my thirst for unique visitors started (and continues, its addictive).
9th Version
Although not strictly a version of Woolie.co.uk, TuTz.co.uk no longer exists, so I thought I would show you what it looked like. I had forked off the tutorials part of Woolie.co.uk onto this new domain, and submitted a further 5/6 tutorials to various sites. TuTz.co.uk was also my first home-grown PHP/MySQL driven site. It was also the worst piece of PHP programming I have ever done (being a newb at the time)
10th Version
Now we’re onto the present style of Woolie’s World. After a long time with TuTz.co.uk no longer active, and having purchased Fly2Blue.com for my Design & Hosting sector, Woolie.co.uk was free for me to use as I pleased. In the mean time I had also purchased several other pointless domains, but hey, why not. This was not the first time I had used WordPress for Woolie’s World, but it was the first time that I had created a theme for it. This was a very quick theme that I did just because I needed to have my own layout on the site.
11th Version
This is when I discovered how useful the WordPress templating system really was, and I truly went to town on this layout. The reason it took me extra long was because I was still quite in the early stages of using CSS fully for the structure of my sites, and there were many options to choose from. I got bored of this layout quite quickly however.
12th Version
Again, this was another version that took me quite a while to create, although I was also unaware that my monitors gamma setting was incorrect. This is why the site looks quite washed out, as it looked fine to me as I was designing it. In this version, I focused more on the styling of the content as well as just the page that surrounded it.
13th Version
I never quite liked this version, however its the version that I took more time styling the content on, and tried to make the design more simple.
14th Version
Although slightly rushed, this version stayed up for a long time. It did have some problems though such as the footer magically appearing in the middle of the page occasionally in IE.
