Site history

In September 1995 I first got introduced to building homepages. I started with a small personal page at the Dutch provider DDS in Amsterdam. After a few months I decided to make a page about my favourite cars, Citroën. The page was of poor quality in the begining and did not attracted many visitors. It was in about December 1996 when I first got the idea of building a GS and GSA Homepage. That was after I searched the WWW on the keywords "(Citroën)NEAR (GS OR GSA)". When I got the search form, >I was totally surprised to find some homepages dedicated to the GS and GSA.

Because I have a huge GS and GSA brochures collection, I decided to use that to build my own GS and GSA website. In February 1997 the first version of my GS and GSA homepage went on air. Because I was not satisfied with the quality of my pages, I decided to redesign them. I bought a book about HTML and started. After a long summer of hard work, my new GS and GSA pages where ready at 1 September 1997. By then I had switched to the American provider Tripod. Because my DDS-account was overloaded with images, due to the small diskspace. Tripod offered 2MB, which was at the time more than enough to host all my pictures. Soon I came to the conclusion that the quality, and also visitors numbers had improved. But still I wasn't satisfied. The material I had used creating this homepage, was the material I had.

What I'm trying to say is that Version 2.0 was a better HTML design, but it had not a so called "User Interface". An other thing was the list of subjects, which was displayed in a frame, was growing to long. This caused me to think about yet another update of my homepage. Luckely I didn't have to spend so much time on this one. Cause most of the information was already there. It just had to be reordered and adjusted.

When version 3.0 was finally ready (around November 1997), I was finally satisfied with the result. Version 3.0, was more "User Interfaced". That means I think it was. It had a special Citroën section, apart from the GS and GSA section, it has a noframes version, it contains colour pictures and you can see that there has been some thinking about the site. Also it contains less commercial banners than version 2.0. Also the site gives a good descripton about the Citroën GS and GSA. Both for the "Connaisseur" and "Non-Connaisseur". Further the site offers a lot of reference material, both on and off the World Wide Web. But it can always be done better and I had still more material to add. Because I felt the need to further improve the site, I decided to start all over again.

Version 4 (summer 2000)
This was totally different compared to the previous versions. To start with, I decided to quit the frames. Although frames make it relative easy to navigate, there are a lot of disadvantages to a frame based homepage. One is the bad results with the different search engines. Another is the unsuitabillity for different other tasks, such as external links to subpages. Besides the frames, I decided to improve the graphical interface aswell. My provider now offered 12MB of diskspace, so I wouldn't have to worry about the size and quantity of images. This resulted eventually in more than 150 Color images of the Citroën GS and GSA. The 'menu structure' of this version is also very different from the previous versions. The main menu is restricted to 8 topics, to keep things from 'overflooding'. This had to be done, due to the increase of subjects which are covered. I have tried to make the different categories as logical and obvious as possible. To assist with navigation, I have added different other tools. The 'sitemap' existed in version 3, but in this version it is further detailed. Every option from the menu is covered, the maximum dept of menu's isn't restricted, at the moment it is at four levels. Besides the sitemap, the 'directory path' is available on every page. This is another powerfull tool to navigate through the site. The alternative text, provided with images and links is also an improvement compared to older version of the site. All things considered, I am quite happy with the result of my efforts. Although I know a site is never 'finished', I think this one can last for some time.

Version 5, spring 2004
Finally four years after the last major update I found the the time to update and rebuild the site. Frames are back to improve maintainability, the menu structure is somewhat different, although the looks of the site haven't changed much. I have added really a lot of material, which I was able to collect over the years. I hope I will collect more in the future, cause I am running out of new things to add. Anyway some statistics:

• Over 1000 GS/GSA related images.

• Nearly 100mb total images and information

• over 50000 vistors since start of the site

• A fancy domain name: www.citroen-gs.nl

I think I have succeeded in my goals with this site. Which was and still is to promote the GS/GSA. Just browse through the old guestbook and see the many and happy messages people have sent me. Through this site people have found enthousiasm for the car, in some cases so far that they have even bought one. In other cases cars where saved due to this site. Lots of other people where helped with technical problems. I am happy to have accomplished that. Since the start of this site, the car has become more popular, more people recognize the GS/GSA as a classic car. I hope this will continue. And I hope in the future I will have time to update more often.

And so I wrote "update more often". The irony of it being the fact that the next major update was only in 2019, apart from some small changes in 2009. What has it been. More or less a lack of time and too much of a project to do all the work at once. So the solution, start with small steps. The same psychology as with running marathons. Do not think of the 42 kilometers. Take it with one step at a time and enjoy the run. Before you know it you are at the first five kilometers point. Where there are refreshments. With of course the next refreshments only five kilometers way. Before you know it you will be at the finish. Beside the small updates with content I have plans to make it more mobily friendly, add some more responsiveness and see if I can get or build something to better display images. The most important will be however having fun!