Life is cyclical. There are highs and lows, peaks and troughs. As you move forward through your journey, you will ultimately find that it bends back on itself. Our experience is an ouroboros, and one that not even I, a human of no consequence, can escape. As I prepare to take my body and soul into a new decade, it only makes sense that my future course would intersect once again with my past as I awake one night in a cold sweat and mutter to myself, “DGHD needs a new website.” However, to be able to navigate the future, one must truly understand the past. Come with me traveler, as we journey through DGHD’s half-assed websites of yore and learn from our history…
The very first DGHD website was one of utter simplicity.
No mistakes to be made here folks. Other than the fact that all of these were images and if your connection was bad you’d just pull up a blank website. I have HIRE listed prominently, yet faded out implying in a way that you couldn’t hire me even if you tried. That’s why I make the big bucks.
This was the only website that I had a backup of, but luckily I was able to pop by ye olde archive.org’s wayback machine and take some snaps of some of the ones I might’ve missed. Like this wonderfully broken version where I was most likely was testing something and then forgot to finish it.
“Billy barnum and the root tooters. Great band, bad situation.” My word salad lorem ipsum reads like the tagline of a straight-to-vhs movie. I swapped it for actual l’ipsum in the next version that I have absolutely zero memory of making.
Straight forward and to the point, but perhaps too minimal. What if I modernized it with a modded wordpress theme and made the background look like a corrupted jpg?
YES!! Now THAT’s what I’m talking about. Check this one out, this has all the hallmark signs of a website. You’ve got a menu, there are multiple pictures, a sidebar with the only two videos I had made at the time. The best part of this version was actually loaded BEFORE the website though.
That’s right. That website had a custom loading screen!!! Damn, why didn’t I put that on the new site? Oh, maybe because you essentially wind up having to load the loader and just delaying the website even more. I assume after all the bells and whistles of that one I wanted to go with something a little more simplified.
But is it too simple?? Is the grey on grey look really the best approach?? Should there be any type of hierarchy on this website at all?? Around this time is when I presumably got burnt out on asking myself questions like those and decided to simply turn digitalhotdogs.com and dghd.tv into redirects straight to bandcamp. That’s where everyone wanted to go anyways right? That’s why the big dogs in the industry say, “Keep It Simple You Stupid Little Shit.”
Since Bandcamp did all the heavy lifting, I could spend more time on anything other than having to manage a website. This was incredibly freeing and a great move for my mental health. But as the years progressed, I craved the extra instability that supplying constant content for a website imposed on me. I needed another thing to manage, maybe another SIX things? And now I have them.
Here we are. A brand new website with a shiny new calendar, and new releases built right into it. New website, new DGHD. Well, not really, it’s definitely the same old bullshit. Just wrapped up a lil cleaner for your consumption. Enjoy!!
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