Welcome to the History section. In this section you can find how Final Frontier is created over the time and what is changed. From a free tripod account to a full domain, from 10 music videos to 400 music videos. The website of Final Frontier Media (FFM) has changed over the years. In this part of the history section I will show you just that. Images will show you how FFM looked in his early days till now. If you want the short story, please visit the Archive - Short history section. If you have any questions, please contact me.

The welcome page was until January 2007 not much changed. The welcome story had little grammar changes and some extra information. Since 2005 old news was transferred to the Archive section every month. Therefore the welcome page in 2006 in image 2 has less news than in image 1 in 2003. Also changed along the way is the date before the news. In 2003 till 2005 every news line had a date, even if it was the same as the news line above. This is changed in 2006, as you can see in image 2. In January 2007 I changed the welcome page. I have renamed it to Home page, which I found more appropriate. The date was now much more clearly visible. All news items of that day were listed below the date. There was a maximum of 2 months of news at the home page, to ensure quick loading times. The old welcome story is still available, a bit changed, as Short history and can be found in the archive. Image 4 shows this section back then and at image 5 you see the short history as when it was created in 2010. The history section was for a short while a separate section, but in April 2008 it became a part of the "About" section. With the complete renewal of Final Frontier Media in 2010 the Home page is again changed, as you can see at image 6. The news got his own section, you can see this at image 7. The history section as known in the last layout is splitted in two. The all ready mentioned short history in the archive and the history section at the top menu, which you're reading right now. For this history section see image 8.

Sections, sections and sections

In April 2008 after all the important sections were renewed and/or renamed, only one section did look a lot like when it was created back in 2003. In my eyes all the necessary upgrades had been done. The new sections Awards, Newsletter, Archive, History, Sitemap, Statistics, Timeline and StarTrek2009 were satisfactory at the time. All the updates were small and didn't had really a great impact for the lay-out of that page. One other section is missing and that's the banner section. With the in April 2008 created "about" section, this section also had a small change in lay-out. That also counted for the section Awards and Contact. The section I talked about in the first line is the Pictures section.

The section pictures has little changed over the years until October 2008. Back in 2003 (image 1)when the section was created, the information from the front page was just copy-pasted into a new page. After a while I added more subpages. This pages would be some sort of gallery. All pictures were manually resized and put online. After that, manually links to the full size pictures were added. I could have used a Gallery, but I choose to do everything manually. This means that for a while the website exists of 43 pages with 37 pages for the section pictures alone. It took a long time to create a new page for this section with pictures. In 2005 I decided to stop with that kind of gallery. People could download the pictures, and that's it. The look and feel weren't changed, only there were no subpages. In the summer of 2007 I changed my opinion and believed that it would be easy for people to watch the pictures online, so I added a Coppermine gallery, you can see it at image 3. The pictures section, as you can see in image 2, stayed till October 2008. The Gallery was only for the people of the StarTrek.nl forum. Therefore you need to register to watch the pictures and is the site language in Dutch. All ready in September 2008 the gallery was removed because people didn't visit it a lot and security problems. This was the moment that I decided I had to renew the section, as soon as possible. One month later the renewal was complete. The look and feel of the Pictures section was now comparable with other sections (Links, About, Archive). Image 4 shows you how the section was redesigned. The pictures were divided into three categories. In image 5 you can see inside a category. This was a lot more attractive and still it was easy to download the pictures. With the complete renewal of Final Frontier Media in 2010 this section also dissapeared. You can directly link to the three categories from the home page. The current situation of this can be seen at image 6.

Last but not least

The website has changed a lot over the years. Back in 2006 quick loading, multi-browser support and multi-resolution support were big issues. From the last months of 2007 till begin 2010 all those issues had been resolved. They're not the primary problems of this website any more. With the arrival of PHP for Final Frontier Media the maintenance had become much easier. The fixed width has given Final Frontier Media the same looks for everybody. This in combination with a style sheet has created also more continuation across the pages. Now I want to talk about some small sections with small changes. These are the Awards, Banner and Contact section. Furthermore I will discuss a little about the sections About, Newsletter, Sitemap, StarTrek 2009, Statistics and Timeline. Also the section Archive will be discussed.

As we look at the Awards section (image 1 through 4) you can see not a lot had changed. Since September 2006 the section Awards exists and had three changes. The first: a fixed width change in April 2008, second is the new section About, which the awards was a sub-section of, and third the renewal of Final Frontier Media 2010. I didn't like the layout of this section so when the awards section was added to the About section, I removed every text I had added with an award. In 2010 the award section is splitted into two parts. The part where you can win the Final Frontier Media Award is added as a seperate section, in the top menu. This is completey new. The part which existed all ready is now part of the Archive. The banner section (image 5 through 7) has the smallest changes of all pages. There are only several new banners added and the layout is adapted in 2010 to the renewed Final Frontier Media. Since May 2008 the banner section is part of the About section and had therefore also a horizontal menu. In 2010 the banner section is again a section on it's own and can be found in the top menu. The Contact section (image 8 through 10) is mostly changed behind the scenes. In 2006 when I changed to a paid domain, the contact section was offline for some time. The form used in this section used the possibilities from Tripod, which did not exist at my paid domain. In 2007 after receiving hundred of spam messages a week I used a different form. It's still in use today and protects me from spam, also after changing the e-mail address. The contact section was part of the About section and had therefore a horizontal menu. The contact section is now the only section which has it's own page. Every other section is loaded into the index page (using my database). This is because I still use the same contact form. Further some information and credits have been changed, because of the renewed Final Frontier Media in 2010.