This is a compilation of all of the site designs over the years, from the time that it was incepted and went live years ago on Earthlink's servers, until now. Gone is the MIDI background music, seamless blend filter graphics and 3D rendered fonts, however the original spirit of the site -- that of an integral nexus of all that is BM -- still remains very much alive today. With 10 revisions and counting, we're only going to continue to improve over time!

 

BMUG v1, the one that started it all. Used Notepad for all of the site development. Background MIDI music, sprites, and rendered graphics were also used throughout.

BMUG v2, the lessons learned from v1 were applied to the sleeker v2. More rendered graphics, including the completed Sophia the 3rd model. The "X" marks where the counter was.

BMUG v2a, added an entry page. Also joined two Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)-based webrings, which were very popular back then since search engines were not as omnipresent as they are now. The code in the background is the front page source code translated into hex.

BMUG v3, started experimenting with frames heavily. Everything was animated by mouse-over.

BMUG v3, Xmas mode. Everything from the icons to the mouseovers were given a Xmas theme.

BMUG v4, threw the frames out and used tables to separate everything instead. About this time Sunsoft approached BMUG for consulting work, and the rest is history.

BMUG v5, the first revision in which a black background was not used (this was after the period of the Internet censorship blackout ended, where many used a black background in the protest - not to mention it looked very cool). This site design lended itself to a scalable setup, and was much easier on the eyes.

BMUG v6, in which there's no visual difference between v5 and v6. The only real change was behind the scenes: v6 used PHP and various templates to render pages and headers.

BMUG v6a... lost the original files in a drive crash. This was basically all in frames and using a blue/purple/white color scheme. If the backup files are ever found again, we'll post an image of this revision.

BMUG v7, guess you could call this our 'blue period'. Used imapping mainly to sectionalize everything. This was the prototype for the layout on BMUG v8.

BMUG v8, used a template for the site design, which worked to help in the transition from v7. No imaps, less load time. Possibly the best layout the site has ever had, until version 9.

BMUG v9, moved to a content management system (CMS) for the first time. Very fast deployment and modifications, plus updates were a breeze. Many new features such as a music gallery, dynamic media display, dropdown menus, scrolling headline stories and for the first time ever, an ad network. Also notable is the simultaneous launch of the parent site, NORA Academy.