Bridgemeister.com Through the Years
This is an image set within the Bridgemeister collection.
| Bridge: | Bridgemeister.com Through the Years |
| Location: | USA |
| Image Set Contributor: | David Denenberg |
| Date of Images: | 1998-2020 |
| Related Image Lists: | All from David Denenberg All in USA |
The initial version of Bridgemeister.com was launched as a personal web page in early September 1998 at users.erols.com/ddenenberg. That very first version was just a list of approximately 110 North American suspension bridges in, what is now, the "condensed" inventory format. The site was originally titled "A Span for All Seasons". That jokey play on "A Man for All Seasons" was dropped several years later, but a vestige of it lived on for many years in the public email address for the site ("A Span…": aspan@bridgemeister.com). The "Bridgemeister.com" domain started in 2002 and the site transitioned away from my old personal web space.
You can find many old versions of the complete website at the Internet Archive. Below are a few glimpses of the past. This is, perhaps, a good opportunity for me to acknowledge that I didn't put much effort during the first 20 years into making the site "pretty," rather focusing on architecting the list and search capabilities to produce extremely fast response times for rendering any list of bridges or images. Finally, in 2020, I concentrated more time into fixing many encoding issues (to enable a broader set of languages and their characters to be used everywhere) and to make the site responsive and usable in all form factors (phone, tablet, desktop) without requiring development of separate mobile-friendly pages. While 2020 has brought the biggest user experience changes to Bridgemeister.com, there are still many aspects of Bridgemeister that have changed little since 1998. One constant is a selection of people posing on bridges greeting the Bridgemeister.com visitor.
June 2000. The "Everything Else" led to non-bridge related personal content.
September 2002.
October 2002. The "expanded" inventory format at the time.
October 2002. The "condensed" inventory format at the time. The condensed inventory was still split into North American and "non-North American" lists. There was no search capability and no ability to request any subset of the inventory (by country, state, etc.).
January 2004. Tag lines start to appear ("Eye Candy for Bridge Lovers"). Unfortunately, the Comic Sans font persists.
March 2004.
May 2005. The rust-colored Comic Sans font has been removed, finally, and the www.bridgemeister.com logo image appears. Except for the later consolidation of "Snapshots" (my images) and "Contributions" (everyone else's images), the front page remained largely unchanged for 14 years (!!) until I dropped the bluish-greenish aqua background in March 2019. An "Announcements" link also appeared in 2006, but I stopped using that feature in 2007 and there were no new announcements for 13 years (until I removed the link in 2020).
May 2005. The inventory introduction page.
June 2020. The latest home page as it appeared just before applying several of the mobile-friendly changes.
July 2020. A scrollshot of the new home page in a typical phone form factor.
