History of this site

20+ years in the making



See the whole collage Experience old sites on the Wayback Machine



1996

First (official) website I launched in the early months of 1996 (started building it by the end of 1995).

It was hosted at that time on AOL Germany - switching over to local provider Handshake about one year later.

Early 1997

In the beginning of 1997 the site essentially changed its colours and basic layout by introducing a coloured side bar.

You can see elements of later pages on this site.

Mid 1997

Later in 1997 a complete new design saw the day of light. It was inspired by the former msnbc.com website beta versions.

The images and textual links were aligned to an imaginary vertical line in the middle of the website.

The site was hosted on geocities.com

Late 1997

Also in 1997 this geocities.com hosted site spurted a Internet Explorer inspired look. The links to other website pages were design as 'directories' with icons.

The site was focused mostly on downloads and support for Encounter, my award-winning Windows Sound Editor that won the IBM Leonardo da Vinci Awards two years earlier as DS-SoundEdit 1.0

Berkeley 1997

1997 was a creative year for me.

In spring/summer of 1997 I created a Berkeley Class Of 2001 website before I entered the University of California at Berkeley to study Computer Science.

It was meant to bring new Cal/Berkeley students together before they actually met on campus.

It can be seen as a first early student social network of sorts.

The site's launch was featured in an academic journal. I gave an interview for an article in a Washington-based publication.

1998

At the end of 1998 this redesign was created.

A layout that essentially lasted for more than two years with slight updates only.

It featured Javascript banners that lead to other parts of the website and more.

1999-2000

As you can see - the 1999/2000 update was essentially cosmetic - changing the colours, adding more pages and implementing cascading style sheet weblinks.

It was heavily based on the original 1998 design.

2001-2002

The 2001 design introduced several new concepts.

A fresher and cleaner look powered by modern technologies showed viewers the new millenium was there.

New here - the motto "Learn to expect more" was first introduced. It lasted 17 years on this site.

2003

2003 saw a major redesign to the 'waschbuschdotcom' look-and-feel which ended up lasting a whooping 15 years with only minor changes.

This was essentially at a time where static websites took a breather and dynamic sites became mainstream.

PHP and MySQL powered the updates on the homepage along with further dynamic graphical elements.

2007-2008

The Mid-2000s got me into blogging with a self-hosted page on waschbusch.com based on WordPress.

This was integrated into the main site as blog snippets on the homepage.

It was both a blessing and a curse, where a misunderstood post on Facebook and blog ended up getting me in hot water and made me stop blogging for a while.

2018

After the longest hiatus possible I finally decided to update ulfw.com

In the last few years the site and blog were largely abandoned and the domain mostly used for email.

Being back in the search for a new job, it was the right time to bring the site to the 21st century as a simple and clean responsive HTML5 site.