In the aftermath of the Barings bank collapse in 1995, and its purchase for £1 by ING, its private equity arm (Baring Private Equity Partners) - which was neither directly connected with the bank's activities, nor affected by them - wanted to ringfence itself from ING influence. It decided to commission a website and, I am still not sure how, I was asked to pitch for the job. I built a demo site, put it on a floppy and visited the BPEP offices to show the men in suits.
I built the site in BBEdit Lite in three or four days. As was the fashion at the time, my brief was "We want a website" and nothing more; no purpose was imagined and, other than when I asked for locations/addresses etc, no content was provided - not even for the legal notice, although this was signed-off on by their lawyers.
The site (made to be displayed 640 x 480, natch) used every sin in the canon: multiple nested frames for top menu and left-hand navigation; and, yes, it had an image map. The plan, for my part at least, was to use this as a placeholder and then move to something less embarrassing. That never happened, and I was paid to maintain my Frankenframed monster for more than a year before ING finally asserted themselves.
I've just unearthed a broken fragment from the Wayback machine [1], if anyone has the stomach to look at it. For best (!) results, follow this route map:
- The link should punt you to an obligatory legal warning page (and yes, this did necessitate duplicating the entire frame-based navigation - don't ask).
- When it loads, click on "worldwide" in the top menu. [Edit to add: the hotspots on the image map now take a while to react when you hover over them.]
- When what remains of that loads, click on the topmost orange triangle in the left-hand nav bar. That should give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole went.
Ha! That's decent of you. I was actually quite proud of the site weight. The orange triangle gifs - one pointing to the right and another pointing downwards - weighed almost nothing, and everything nav-wise was optimised (transparency out of background colour) to the max. The nav font was their bespoke version of frutiger, hence the need for graphical nav elements.
When it all worked, there used to be historical quotes, which I'd culled from a privately published Barings history book I found in their offices, that appeared under the l-h nav elements. One, from Cardinal Richelieu, referred to Barings as one of the "three major powers in Europe".
The book also related how Barings joined forces with its archenemy Rothschilds (under the auspices of the British Relief Association [1]) to provide relief to Ireland during the potato famine, in the absence of meaningful action from the British government.
I really enjoyed the work, and learnt a lot of history.
There was show on here a few days ago (The dark side of the 90's) all about the Beenie Baby craze. It funny that they covered the website that was pitched by 2 teenagers with only a few days work and eventually approved.
In the aftermath of the Barings bank collapse in 1995, and its purchase for £1 by ING, its private equity arm (Baring Private Equity Partners) - which was neither directly connected with the bank's activities, nor affected by them - wanted to ringfence itself from ING influence. It decided to commission a website and, I am still not sure how, I was asked to pitch for the job. I built a demo site, put it on a floppy and visited the BPEP offices to show the men in suits.
I built the site in BBEdit Lite in three or four days. As was the fashion at the time, my brief was "We want a website" and nothing more; no purpose was imagined and, other than when I asked for locations/addresses etc, no content was provided - not even for the legal notice, although this was signed-off on by their lawyers.
The site (made to be displayed 640 x 480, natch) used every sin in the canon: multiple nested frames for top menu and left-hand navigation; and, yes, it had an image map. The plan, for my part at least, was to use this as a placeholder and then move to something less embarrassing. That never happened, and I was paid to maintain my Frankenframed monster for more than a year before ING finally asserted themselves.
I've just unearthed a broken fragment from the Wayback machine [1], if anyone has the stomach to look at it. For best (!) results, follow this route map:
- The link should punt you to an obligatory legal warning page (and yes, this did necessitate duplicating the entire frame-based navigation - don't ask).
- When it loads, click on "worldwide" in the top menu. [Edit to add: the hotspots on the image map now take a while to react when you hover over them.]
- When what remains of that loads, click on the topmost orange triangle in the left-hand nav bar. That should give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole went.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000303162503/http://www.bpep.c...