The DoD3, acronym for Domain of Death3, is the thrid version of a highly unsuccessful line of websites made by this guy. Actually I shouldn’t say that because the thrid revision is actually gaining a foothold in the online theme park universe. So what was The DoD like back in its early days? How well (or bad) did it do? Why the hell is this site called Domain of Death 3 anyway? Well…here’s the story…

In 2000 or so, one of my good friends made a website using AOL’s website service. It was basically a page showing photos of his friends. I remember I had a nice photo on there of me giving a devil horns hand gesture with some nu metal band poster behind me. After that I thought to myself “well that’s pretty cool! Let me see if I can make one,” so I set up one on AOL. I planned to add band reviews and topics relating to amusement rides, being a hobby of mine.

When choosing the name I wanted something that sounded kind of cool but kind of tongue in cheek as well. I planned that the site was going to have a large concentration of band reviews so I wanted something metal…something HARDCORE sounding. I remember getting a death metal album around that time called Domain of Death by Mortician. At the time I ate up anything that made me feel more metal and this was no different; now I can’t even listen to this album or many of the others that I bought back then. But, the name of their album kind of worked. This was a web domain (well, sub-domain at the time) and there was going to be metal reviews! There we go! Domain of Death was the name. After a little time on AOL I switched the site over to Tripod. At this point I also started utilizing a webpage editor called Cool Page Editor.

At first the site was just band reviews and carnie ride reviews but after awhile I saw a site called StickDeath.com. The site had all these funny GIF and Flash animations of stickmen getting mutilated. Well hell, I wanted some on my site! So I downloaded a primitive animator program and started churning out stick death gifs! At one point I had like 15 on the site and it became the main drawing point of my site. Some were pretty inventive I have to say! I had one where stick Justin Timberlake was on TRL and his hair started growing for no reason. It grew so large that it filled the entire studio and smashed the windows open. All of the people sitting in the studio fell onto a truck carrying an A-Bomb (what a coincidence!) which blew up. At the end it said “see all the crap the NSYNC causes?!” A classic.

All was going well on Domain of Death until…the time bomb code went off. Approximately one year (and like a laughable 150 hits later) the website editor’s internal scripting kicked in and suddenly you couldn’t switch pages without clicking ‘cancel’ on a pop-up box that said “Would you like to buy Cool Page Editor?” The frickin thing said it was free! That was the end of DoD1 as I abandoned it soon after; it remained an internet deserted island for many years on Tripod.

Domain of Death 2.0

Here is the main page of DoD 2.0 as found in the depths of my old hard drive. Look at its awfulness!

In January of 2004 I started on Domain of Death 2.0. I know it was January 2004 because I actually found some of the old .html files that I had edited and saved which most of them had Jan 2004 as the earliest last modified time. This time I was using CoffeeCup Free editor. It seemed like a decent editor, but I was soon to find otherwise! I remember trying to upload the files to tripod but the photos would never load correctly even though everything seemed right! I then lost interest again, discouraged with the photo thing (which I would be able to fix now.)

In July 2004 I started again, again I know this because the files were last modded in July of 2004. I thought I knew what was wrong, whipped up some pages and once again the photos didn’t load right. I gave up. Again. DoD2.0 was dead before it even hit the web, but I still count it as a site beacuse it was a browsable site in my C drive.

Domain of Death 3

Here is the original DoD3 main page, it’s still pretty damn bad.

On February 28, 2005, 7:02:57 PM I created the index.html page for what was to become Domain of Death III or Domain of Death 3 (or now just The DoD3.) This time I used PageBreeze HTML editor, a program that I continued to use up until I decided that my site would be easier to run using Wordpress. I made all the pages I felt like making, deleted all of my old stuff from Domain of Death 1 which was still on Tripod (I should have kept it as a time capsule) and uploaded all the new content in March sometime.

The site had all the sections that the DoD3 has now except that it also included a “Knex Rides” section because at that time I still screwed around with those Knex things and made functional amusement rides out of them. The site was all in a format where if you maximized the window, the text would also spread out, there were no tables governing where everything went.

A little less than one year later, on February 11th 2006, I started building the next transformation of DoD3. The new format used tables to keep everything in order and had a ‘nicer’ look. The content pretty much stayed the same; I just made the site more ‘aesthetically pleasing.’ At this point I changed every page from .html to .php in preperation for a switch to a different web host. With .php, I could use “.php include” codes which allow me to update all of the sidebars using one page.

Here is an example of the DoD3 version 1.1 layout. The layout is nicer, but cheesy as heck looking.

As for stats: In 2005, I accumulated 640 pageloads and 283 unique visitors (a unique visitor is one actual visitor) or in other words, complete bupkis. In 2006 I once again received more dismal hittage until about the time when I updated the site. I had about 2000 hits by then which was nice I thought. I started getting more hits when I added the Action Park page and when someone linked me on Wikipedia’s Zipper page. The hits to my site began to really pour in when I added the Play2Win page in November of 2006. My site’s hits shot up and by the end of 2006 I had 8,735 pageloads and 3,487 unique visitors. The Play2win page hits began to wane after the show went off-air in the US but the Action Park page began to get huge hits daily. The Action Park page continues to be the most visited page on my site and nearly all of the e-mails I’ve gotten pertain to the page.

On March 4th 2007, I changed hosts from Tripod to Byethost and I registered the domain “domainofdeath3.com.” On May 19th, 2008 I started work on the next ‘version’ of DoD3, adding in Wordpress for a news page and keeping the static html pages; soon after I switched to all Wordpress served pages. I then got kicked off of Byethost for using too many resources and went to HostGator (a paid webhost.) Finally in Janurary of 2009, I built the layout for the current look (not bad for someone who self taught how to code!)

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