On October 24, 1995, WebWise Design and Marketing went live with our first three Client websites.
- City of Fennimore, Wisconsin — Still our client!
- Fennimore Cheese — Steve Bahl sold to Sid Cook, Carr Valley Cheese owner. Yes, they are our client!
- Tim Slack Auction & Realty — Still our client!
I created those websites at no cost to them in the early years, so WebWise Design & Marketing would have a client list online.
In 1995, not many people in Southwest Wisconsin, or anywhere else, knew much, if anything, about the World Wide Web or even the Internet. If I could get someone to listen, I had to explain what the Internet and the World Wide Web were, and why they'd want to pay me to put their business, community, or organization online.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) was first used to create the very first websites in 1991. The first official version, HTML 1.0, was released in 1993. In 1995, HTML 2.0 was published with a few minor improvements.
Creating page layouts was definitely a challenge. Paragraph tags separated content. We used transparent, one-pixel spacer GIFs. We laid out pages by designating how many horizontal or vertical spaces to use. In 1997, tables became available, which made displaying content in **rows and columns**! At the time, it was a very big deal, though tables quickly taught us how code impacts performance and page load time.
Well, that's enough for now of the earliest years here at WebWise.
More to come later…