I recently got a hot tip that I was not the first owner of acmecoke.com (Thanks Steve!). This was big news – so I quickly checked archive.org – and there it was! Classic webdesign for 20 years ago and a real snapshot of the times. I couldn’t help myself but to set out and recreate the site on my own server where load times are faster and I can repair any dead links or missing images that archive.org lost.
But things quickly snowballed when I found that the blast furnace also had a website! And then….another for Acme Metals Inc and yet another for Acme Steel Company – and each with their own domain name. My work is nearly done so the time has come to reintroduce these important websites to the world. Check them out and think back to a time when the batteries were charged and the plant was alive!
acmecoke.com
This was of course the first site I tackled. It had been crawled many times and almost nothing had been lost. It is the only of the sites that does not use a ‘stay in place’ menu bar on the left. It does have a menu bar on the left, but it is not on all pages and it does not infringe on the main body of the web page so it appears better on a mobile device. metallicugical-coke.com was referenced on the front page. I found that website – it was basically only a placeholder used to funnel more traffic to acmecoke.com. It was just a single webpage, so I took all that content and created a new page on acmecoke.com. There was a couple changes over the years to the home page, I took content from all of them and what you see here is sort of an amalgamation of them. The Co-Op Partnership page was a real Rosetta Stone, it explained the meaning and origin of my sign and why it was found in the gatehouse. I assumed the ‘co-op’ just referred to the relationship between the union and Acme but it refers to the relationship between the union (of the coke plant workers) and the guards who worked in the gatehouse (that union appears to no longer exist, probably absorbed by another union). I couldn’t resist but to add a small photo of my sign to the page. One of the only images that was lost was of the safety committee on the safety page, that was a heartbreaker. I just used the Acme logo as a placeholder. The same goes for the foundry coke page, I found a photo of some real foundry coke and added it back in. The ‘Chicago Coke Plant’ header wasn’t used consistently and there were some sizing inconsistencies so I fixed all of that. When I made the met coke page, I totally imitated the foundry coke page (which was unique amongst the website). This was the only site that used htm file types, the rest were all asp (I converted them all to htm).
Check it out at 2001.acmecoke.com
acme-blastfurnaces.com
This was the first page I had to wrangle with the left side menu bar. I was not able to get the HTML version of that translated to my site so I just started over. I used a simple Java menu bar and modified it until it was as similar as possible. Unfortunately, the site had only been crawled one time ever and all images were lost. Initially I tried to use other found photos of the furnace plant but I decided that was phony. So the only real image on the site is on the home page, it is the rendering of the ‘A’ furnace on my Acme mug (which I got as a gift from Doug). Every page on the site has a different background color so I made sure to keep that intact. I added a little script to the ‘About the Blast Furnace’ page to reveal the vision statement and mission statement. Previously these were actually housed on separate pages. On the ‘What’s New’ page, I turned the press releases into PDFs. The E-Manufacturing page was not crawled and was lost. On the ‘Employees’ page (again, very sad that the photos were lost as I am pretty sure they were of actual people) I turned the list of union reps into a PDF as well and imitated the background color and fonts from the webpage they were kept on previously. For some reason, the phone and fax numbers on the contact page had a Denver area code – I fixed that. Besides the fact that the images were all dead links, the overlapping four photos found on a few pages had their coordinates all thrown off by my new Java menu bar. I struggled to realign them (when I was still entertaining using new images) but it was a real nightmare. That is the typical kind of code that is easily done with a piece of software and super difficult by hand. There was a ‘virtual tour’ linked via an image in the menu bar but it was never crawled so I can only wonder what that looked like.
Check it out at fce.acmecoke.com
acme-metals.com
The simplest site with only three pages, it does have some subpages from the ‘Financial’ page. Unlike the furnace plant page, the left side menu bar used an image map for the links instead of text links. I killed that and used the furnace plant menu bar as a template. Again, I have been converting all the press releases to PDFs but on the ’96-97′ page, there are a great deal of them, I am about 1/3rd done there and still working on it. The main header at the top was misaligned on all pages, I fixed that and got them all centered. I also updated the SEC link on the ‘Financial’ page. The old link did work, but this one is more specific so it requires no interaction with sec.gov and the results are waiting for you when you click. I also made the logo in the menu bar a link back to the home page, as ‘home’ was not an option in the left side or bottom menu bars. The ‘site map’ page is interesting, it uses an image map for the diagram but it isn’t even valid, it links the jobs page (on acmesteelco.com) to the flowchart box marked ‘site map’. More interesting still is that a look at the code shows an array of additional options
Check it out at acmemetalsinc.acmecoke.com
acmesteelco.com
This is by far the largest of the four sites. Has many pages and more subpages to boot. The side menu bar again was an image map which I did away with. The bottom menu bar did not at all match the side so I cleaned that up as best I could. The ‘Employment’ page is directly linked by the furnace plant and Acme Metals sites so I had that built before I even started on this domain. I’ve got a lot of work left to do on this one, but I am at least 8 hours deep so far on the first three domains, so I need a day off.