10 years of MtBethel.org

It was just over 10 years ago, on July 20, 1997, that Roger Barnette had the foresight to purchase the domain mtbethel.org for our church. Given that there are hundreds of organizations named “Mt. Bethel” in the US, having such a great domain name is only possible because of Roger.

I thought it’d be neat to take a look at the changes in the site through the years. I don’t have any screenshots from the first few years, but we can start in March of 2000. This design, along with the next four, was done by Mike Gutting. (you can click on any image to view a larger version of it)

In October of that year, Mike added a column on the right side of the page to show additional information:

Not too much later, in January of 2001, Mike updated again with a fresh look:

In April of 2001, the look was refined a bit further. This is one of my favorite old designs of the site:

A few years later, in February of 2003, the site got a nice new look:

There was one more design that Mike had done, but I can’t find a copy of it. It was the first one that started asking questions on the front page (”What Should I Expect When I Visit?”, “How Do I Get There?”, “What’s Available For My Kids?”, etc), which was a very useful thing for new visitors.

Next up was my first design for the site, in September of 2004:

In April of 2006, the color changed to red. The front page looks a bit different, but the inside pages stayed about the same:

Later in 2006, just before the end of the year, we released this design:

Finally, here we are today:

And there you have it. If you happen to have copies of any other design that I might have missed, please e-mail them to me and I’ll post them up here.

Mickey