ShowBizPizza.com Version 2.0 -

"VegaNova's ShowBiz Pizza Place & Chuck E. Cheese's Website"

(November 1999 - December 2003)

Intro Page

Homepage

This is the appearance that most people who have been around for years remember - because we used it for a long, long time! As the website was quietly gaining popularity and attention, I wanted something that was expandable and would allow some wiggle-room for growth and future endeavors. And since my mad-HTML skills were still in their infancy, I did what any self respecting webmaster would do - I stole the table code from someone else's site! Actually she was one of my interweb friends, and although her website dissapeared long ago, her code lived on for many years here on SP.com. Here's an archived version of the code I stole.

It was under this design that SP.com grew to include several (and some still active) website additions including the Message Board (Forum), Jasper's Showtape Review, Billy Bob's Bulletin, the Fans Section, Rock-a-Palooza, and the SP.com Fan Club. The original homepage table had only 3 rows, but was expanded to 4 rows because of so many new additions.

I gotta say, it was an exciting time to be a webmaster. SP.com had some pretty hefty competition going on - Nick's ShowBiz Pizza Page (which was actually the 1st ShowBiz site to hit the internet) was still in its prime. Although we collaborated on some projects such as the "Multimedia Archive" for the benefit of the fandom, we were engaged in a healthy competition. It was actually because of this that several sections of SP.com came into existance. When a kid named Danny came to me asking my thoughts about a website he and a friend wanted to start involving "reviewing CEC showtapes", my immediate thought was that I didn't need/want any more competition, so I suggested he join up with SP.com - Jasper's Showtape Review was born and the rest is history.

It was through this period that SP.com stopped being just a simple website where I posted and shared stuff that fans sent to me. A real sense of community began to arise thanks to the addition of a message board - which was originally recommended to me by Dheine71. It could be argued that the SP.com community might not exist if not for him, so if I haven't said thanks for that in the past, I'll say it now - thanks for the awesome idea! People began conversing with one another and just like that, SP.com became a place where people could not just visit, but actually belong to.

Interesting tidbits: Back in the early days of the interwebs I actually considered this to be a webpage rather than a website. I think I assumed "webpage" was meant to denote something maintained by a private individual vs something a little more professional. At any rate the original 2.0 site was called "VegaNova's ShowBiz Pizza Place & Chuck E. Cheese's Webpage" and I found it appropriate to use a hideous gothic font in it. Luckily that was killed when the banner was re-worked and upgraded to a "website".

It might also be interesting to note how prominent my interweb-name "VegaNova" is featured in the banner. Although it may seem like a shameless ploy to mark my territory and get my name out there (it was), there was also a practical reason behind it as well: At the time I was running a few other sites, and I had planned to combine everything into a web-ring of sorts, with the banner becoming the common thread between them all. An example of this can be seen in the short lived VegaNova's Sale Page site.