I started making websites back in the year 2000 when I was 12 years old. At first they were pretty bad, but with time I learned a little more about graphic design and coding and made it work. I was friends with a lot of people who owned anime-themed domains collectives who made various shrines, fanlistings, and cliques. A lot of those sites are gone, sadly, and I never had a domain name, because I couldn't afford to get one and the appropriate hosting. I stopped running my sites in 2008 mostly due to boredem. A lot of my friends had stopped running theirs too; the craze had passed. But in those eight years, I ran the following sites: fanlistings for the artist Junko Mizuno and Hazuki Fujiwara from Ojamajo Doremi; shrines for characters like Meroko from Full Moon o Sagashite, Riku from Kingdom Hearts, and Raven from Teen Titans; a pixel site you can read more about below; and even a web comic based on Alice in Wonderland.
Below are some examples I found on the Wayback Machine or in the depths of my file archives. Right click and open screenshots to to see them in their original scale.
I think this was the last layout I ever made for my collective, and I wouldn't even call it much of one. The art is from Red Garden, an anime I really liked around 2008, and I remember approaching it as if I was just making a slightly larger livejournal icon. A couple of colored tables, and boom! Done! I think I left it up until the collective's closure. Most of my sites were gone by this point, save for my Raven shrine and the Junko Mizuno fanlisting.
The previous image is a screencapture from the Wayback Machine that shows a 2006-2007 layout from my old website, which was called "The Curiouser Collective" at the time. If it looks familiar, it's because I used this as the inspiration for this site's first version. I've always been a fan of Sailor Mercury, and this manga illustration was one of the few Ami got to herself, so I decided to recycle the idea and see what else I could do with it.
Wow, a screen cap from back in the day! This image is exactly 1024x768. Classic. Anyway, you can really see I'm getting bored creating layouts, because this literally just a header image. I didn't even try to match a background color. This was at least back when I still had fanlistings though, as you can see all four that I owned listed here. There's more information on some of them below. I'll take a stab in the dark and say I'd probably just played Kingdom Hearts II when I made this, since the layout features Demyx and a shine for the character Riku is listed as "NEW". I don't think that one lasted very long.
This was a layout for the links page around the end of the collective's life. I used art from the Utena movie of the characters Kozue and Miki and for some reason envoked the name of the French film "Les Liaisons Dangereuses", except replacing "liasons" with "twins". I don't even know if that makes grammatical sense in French! It was a right-aligned layout with separate header and footer images--I was big on those, especially towards the end of the collective's life.
And speaking of links, here are some of the 88x31 link banners featured in the image above.
This was a landing page I used from 2003-2006. My site was always hosted on the free space from my family's internet service provider. Back then, it was common for providers to give out small subdomains to host sites on. My dad had been using the original subdomain URL, but once I noticed he wasn't anymore, I asked if I could use it instead. He said yes, and so I made this landing page. I'd always intended to just move my sites there, but it took me a while to get around to it. (I was always very slow when it came to working on sites back then, and tbh I don't think it's changed much.) So this page sat in it's space for a number of years until I actually got around to moving. The woman in the layout is J-pop idol Ayumi Hamasaki.
Before I renamed it, my collective was called Merry Morning. In this 2006 layout, I used a cover from a Jubilee miniseries because I was really into American comics at the time. I divided the art into sections to make it look like comic book panels. Other than that, there isn't a lot to say about this one.
Another Merry Morning layout from 2005-2006. This one features Mamimi from Fooly Cooly. I think it was airing on Adult Swim in the US and I was able to see it for the first time. The quotes on the image are a little soppy, and I think I just made them up because I was trying to look cool. From the links, you can also tell I had a personal site at the time. I don't remember a single thing about it lmao.
This site was called "Invasion of the Girl Bands" and it's where I posted pixel art of J-pop idols. I started it in 2002, and though this says it was version 4, I don't remember the site being around very long. The pixels were based on Tokimeki Memorial and Sailor Moon game sprites and to be honest, I did not do a very good job on them. But I tried!
I also found an earlier layout top banner featuring Ai Kago, but according to the version name, was not the only one that did. It was pretty much the exact same set up, except with the image aligned left on the screen and everything underneath it as in the screenshot above. Also, I have since been told this isn't even Ai Kago, which. Uh. Oops!
At some point or another I must have also had a pixel site, or at least a plan for one, because I found this in my site archives. It features pixel art I made of an Angelic Pretty piano bag (which you can still adopt on my adoption page if you so wish.) Thinking back, I'm pretty sure this never got off the ground and the closest I came was creating this layout for an image map. I never even added navigation.
I only have the image of this one left over, and not a screen shot of the site (I tried getting one from the Wayback Machine but the picture was broken), but this was the shrine I owned for Raven from Teen Titans. I loved this show like crazy back in high school. I definitely saw a lot of myself in Raven at the time, though these days less so. I was really into the alt girl characters at the time, and while I still like them, I am less interested in the goth girl/perky girl dichtomy Teen Titans presented. Anyway, here's a random link banner I found for it!
Like the Raven shrine, I couldn't find any screen caps/Wayback Machine pages with working images, so here are a couple of headers I designed for a shrine to Riku from Kingdom Hearts that existed very briefly. I don't even remember what content it had, or if I ever finsihed it (which seems unlikely). I still love Riku, but if I couldn't finish a shrine for him when there were only three Kingdom Hearts games out, I certainly wouldn't be able to today.
"Ideas from Hell", or "Hellish", as it was later known, was the approved fanlisting for the artist Junko Mizuno. I ran it for years, and it also served as a little informational site on her, though it was never really more than one page. I would occasionally be contacted through the join form because people thought it was her official site and were trying to contact her. At one point, Junko's official site even linked to the fanlisting, which was an honor tbh. No other versions of this fanlisting exist, before or after mine. Sometimes I think about running it again. If only Neocities allowed PHP.
Anyway, here are some of the headers I made for the site. The name changed from "Ideas from Hell" to "Hellish", because a) it was a snappier title, and b) I learned the word "hellish" lmao. I also included a screencap above of the landing page. The 250 members button was supposed to be further right next to the artwork, not overlaping it. Not sure what happened there. Below are some of the buttons I created for people to add to their site to show they were members.
The above was a fanlisting for the character of Ophelia from the Cartoon Network show "The Life and Times of Juniper Lee". There isn't a lot to say about this one. I grabbed this fanlisting late in the fanlist game when it was falling out of fashion to own them. I was big into Teen Titans at the time, and the character reminded me of Raven. Ophelia the character was a generic goth/punk type of character, and Juniper Lee didn't last long as a show, so we didn't learn much about her that would have made her stand out among those character types. The show was alright from what I remember.
Kind of a random one, but this was a fanlisting for the song "Happy Phantom" by Tori Amos. I stand by it being a good song, but it sure wasn't a popular fanlist, and like other small fanlistings, it was hard to keep updated every two months, which was a rule on the Fanlistings Network back then. I think I closed it due to paranoia that I would get kicked out for not updating enough. Here are a couple of buttons from the screenshot.
I found these two images in my old website files, and I think this might have been an unused layout design for the collective. It features Haruko from Fooly Cooly. I think I was bored with doing web design and was more interested in emulating collage, album covers, and whatever design aesthetics were popular on Livejournal at the time. There's also references to no less than four songs I really liked at the time.
If you recognize these ladies, congratulations! You were probably in college at the same time as me. They're The Pipettes, and I was HUGE into them back then. I don't know what this image was going to be for, but I would assume either the collective, the link page, or some kind of Livejournal banner, though it's awfully big for LJ. I think I may have scanned this image myself from a magazine they were featured in. It's honestly super iconic.