Around 2005 I was excited to start seriously learning HTML 3 and write my first REAL website now that this tech had matured and, boy, the Internet was really getting going! I was tired of the limitations of dowdy things like PowerPoint presentations which cannot be as easily distributed as websites can. Imagine my disgust when I realized the then staggering visual limitations of HTML and CSS.  So many basic visual tricks were not allowed: drop shadows, curved edges, mathematically rendered gradients, realtime image size changes, color correcting icons on the fly, non-Flash animations and more. These had to be baked into Photoshop graphics and put in the code as bitmaps. Browser incompatibilities and the fact that CSS was clearly glued onto HTML (in my opinion) frustrated me in extremis. That is Latin for "Take me back to PowerPoint!"

Fortunately I found tedious workarounds at the time. I always do whatever it takes for myself and my clients to get the desired results. Thank goodness things are much better today!  But I deeply miss Adobe Flash animations. I get that they drain phone batteries and had security issues. But websites are a lot less "flashy" with that platform gone.

I like my personal websites to look rather retro. Drop shadows, saturated colors, multiple levels of transparency and, sometimes, 8bit style graphics.  And by that I mean "pleasingly retro" not dial-up looking sites like Craigslist, Reddit or Drudge Report. YUK.  I have no interest in using cutting edge web design to make another harsh, cold website with a huge video playing in the background because it is the "hip" thing to do. If a client wants that it is a different story. My sites are just glorified brochures. They need to look good not have shopping carts. I would also never use something generic like WordPress. My sites are baked from scratch.

WEHOCOMPUTERREPAIR.COM - 2010:  If there is one website that needs to be mobile friendly then it is a computer repair one. If your only computer breaks then you are probably going to look for help using your phone. As you can see in the score at right it does very well with mobile usability. Even higher on desktop! I deliberately made the site look retro with 8bit style graphics in the header and a soothing green color scheme. This appeals to viewers over forty who, due to age, are statistically more likely to be bad at fixing their own computers. If your PC is trashed then you do not want to look at a stark white website full of tech jargon. My local competitors all do this! Their sites are never mobile friendly and, at worst, a scam!

A repair place in Beverly Hills is just two kids in a hole in the wall surrounded by broken robots and a lobby the use as a warehouse. Their website is full of clip art people they claim are employees. The minute you leave their home page the website ends up half baked with stand-in text like "Lorum ipsum dolar". Unfortunately a lot of computer repair people are scammers like used car repair places. A competitor in Weho near Whole Foods is so bad at SEO his website shows "Whole Foods" as the second most searched keyword for his "tech garage." His website even has the name "Stan's Garage" in it. Talk about insipidly confusing car repair with computer repair.

  Nevertheless I love it when my competition screws up! My website has such good SEO I had to throttle it back because I was getting repair calls from Hollywood FLORIDA. EWWW. Florida is America's wang!

ANGRYGAYPOPE.COM - 2008:  The good news is that this website protesting the Church of Scientology got about 8 BILLION hits in just a few months in 2018! The bad news is that this was due to a DDOS attack!  March 13th is cult founder L. Ron Hubbard's birthday. In 2018, on that date, the Church announced its new "Scientology TV Network," apostate Leah Remini announced a new season of her Emmy winning docu series "Scientology and the Aftermath," my anti-Sci YouTube channel was taken down with spurious sexist complaints related to the then new "me too" movement, and my website got blasted by a massive DDOS attack. It promptly went offline. Gee, what a co-incidence. What a day! I won't forget it.

After eight years of not ever being attacked by this notorious group I had become complacent. Later I was surprised they had not tried to DDOS me earlier. They probably were surprised too.

I had no idea how to deal with this. I was kicked off my Internet host for being a bad tenant. Then I was kicked off a second! I didn't have anyone I knew to ask. I had my lawyer send naive registered letters to government authorities which went unanswered.  I had no idea that DDOS was becoming an epidemic that affected individuals which means the public was especially unaware. Drowning in imaginary clicks from virus infected machines, I got traffic from India, Guatemala, Russia, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Brazil and, especially,  Ukraine! At least that is what the Internet thought. Who knows how many times these signals were bouncing around the net from place to place until they finally harassed my net host to get my content "evicted."  Sadly, we think the Internet is "forever," but if a monopoly like Google can't find links to your site, or gets paid off/threatened to deleted your YouTube channel then you go off the search engine index. This is death for an Internet brand.  For a while I had to send visitors to the half archived version of the site on the "Wayback Machine." This free universal backup service was quite the lifesaver but it is slow and, if your site is down, mostly just text only.

AngryGayPope.com has a harsh topic so it is candy colored with a few curved edges but mostly hard edges. Don't let the kid friendly design fool you. Users can drill down into thousands of pages of legal docs, jump to many libraries of videos, watch cult musical numbers and more. My work has been seen on Leah's show and many other venues like Wikipedia. The Church is the only organization to have its servers banned from Wikipedia. No wonder the Scilons wanted my site gone from the Internet. My strong point was making videos and they were launching a competing video channel they knew nobody would watch. They had run out of other ways to stop me. What else could they do but DDOS attack me to this day?  It will never end so I use Cloudflare for protection.

BIGDONSBOYS.COM - 2006:  I had been collecting sexy pictures of guys for a while, especially tall men.  It was almost as if finding and collecting the data was more interesting than looking at it. I realized I could make a web gallery of these men, add my own photos and make money off the Google ads. There were already picture collectors posting things on corporate sites like MySpace but I wanted a site I wrote myself. Also, there were no tall guys websites of any quality and the one group of photos I had that was unusual were tall guys. Tall men, handsome or not, are very hard to find. The images were often lowres or grainy or non-color corrected or all of the above. I would crop them, optimize them, archive them and then insert them into my gallery pipeline. Over the next decade these galleries grew to over 400 in number.

In 2006 galleries were very hard to make with rollovers, realtime changes to bitmap scale or color, curved edges or drop shadows . Workarounds were required which reduced my natural tendency to be "lean and mean." But this also meant that I learned more about HTML programming, more about digital photography and SEO and monetization. I learned about getting into Google Adsense the minute it existed. Did they care that my site was homoerotic or contained pirated media? No they needed a user base and  just wanted me to paste Google Adsense code into my HTML. Eventually was making up to $400 a month in ads, especially during the holidays.

Because I knew the pages would have a lot of skin in them I made the background blue to contrast.  I also wanted all the image thumbnails to be in black and white. Then when you hovered over them they enlarged and went to color. This encouraged browsing and hovering. At first I didn't even label the main sections I just made evocative icons to tease visitors into clicking on the gallery icon to see that is was about "Volleyball" or "Handsomest." Navigation was designed to show as many ads as possible.

But Google decided that my non-porno site was not advertiser friendly enough. A young man from Adsense called me one day (circa 2012) and complained I was going to be dumped from Google's ad platform I had been contributing financially to for years because my site was too Homoerotic/pornographic. It did not have enough original content.  I told him "Go to YouTube and search for 'Gay Porn' and look at all the pirated content the GooglePlex is sponging off of! Adsense does not pay its own way if you want original content. I have made original content to no financial success! I could not afford enough money to pay the talent.  This is so unfair!"

He reacted in a guilty manner.  II passed the test and was kept on the Adsense delivery program. Then I got grandfathered into the next level up of the Google Adsense system. Good news!  But the bad news was that they were losing market share to FaceBook ads. If you were logged into FB advertisers could track you more accurately.  Google Adsense required you to be logged into Google (probably using the Chrome browser) or my website could not track you. Adsense no longer wanted mom and pop curated websites like me around.  Revenue got trashed from $400 to $40 over a period of a year.

Then the GooglePlex algorithm ran amuck and kept banning ads from pages. Legit Olympic swim meet photo galleries were FLAGGED  as "pornography" because of too many skin tones in the bitmaps.   Photos of legit Bisexual porn stars like Zeb Atlas stripping at a Silverlake bar were completely NOT FLAGGED as pornography even though I tagged everything with his stage name which is synonymous with porn. A photo of actor Brenton Thwaites grinning ear to ear wearing bloody makeup on his face for a movie was flagged as "disturbing images." Eventually the Adsense ecosystem collapsed and I deleted it, made no more money but was not censored. I was free to use advertiser unfriendly "poison words" in articles. Words like "died."

BigDonsBoys has been frozen in time since 2016 exactly ten years after it was founded. I blame Google. I don't work for free. Meanwhile Instagram started doing a low rent version of my site by letting anybody post all kinds of incompetent photos so Facebook could monetize them. An uncurated, narcissistic mess, Instagram nevertheless let hot guys post their photos and insipid short videos to a wide audience without needing me. I can't believe how easily people give their content away on social media.

In 2022 I was in a Gay Silverlake one time bar/sex party and a 22 year old guy walked up to me shocked saying "Are you Big Don???!"  I said "Yes." He replied "Your website is what made me realize I'm very turned on by tall men!"  My life passed before my eyes and I felt a million years old. Hilarious!  But this is what happens when a site is up for over a decade.  At the Revolver bar in Weho a handsome shirtless muscle daddy who was the hottest guy there saw me and approached immediately.  "Are you Big Don Weho?"  He introduced himself as Jonathan Rotenberg. As a teenager he repressed his Homosexuality and threw his energy into founding the Boston Computer Society even though he did not own a computer! It later became the largest personal computer user organization in the world. He regularly got calls from Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Yet he was completely overwhelmed by meeting me and very star struck and impressed. I found this hilarious because this website is just my hobby.

When you are a webmaster using Google Analytics and CloudFlare you can see the daily millions of clicks of viewers. They are just numbers. It is not until I randomly meet fans that I realize this website alone has affected millions of people.  Unfortunately there is no tall guys convention or some Gay thing to go to where I can meet fans. A fun feature of the site is you watch the years etch their pain into my face for your amusement.

DONJMYERS.COM - 2005:  My first website is the one you are looking at right now. It has different HTML code and a different host now, but it occupies the same space. Tee hee! You may wonder why the sites I highlight here have up to eighteen year old founding dates behind them. Have I not made a site since 2010? Am I irrelevant? No. I gave birth to them and continue to nurture and upgrade them. When I say I am going to do something for myself and/or my clients I do it.   This involves re-writing all of the sites as the HTML tech updates. Re-coding Google analytics to make the monopoly happy.  Adapting to the limitations of mobile.  "Oh come now Alice, said the Red Queen, you have to run faster than that to stay in one place."

Over time upgrading legacy sites becomes impractical.  In 2023 I am rewriting and re-conceiving the whole thing from scratch. At the time of first construction the point of this site was to highlight my movie work to help me get gigs. But, since I only wanted to work at Flash Film Works anyway, I left the site pretty basic from the beginning. I didn't really care until my movie FX career was finally totally outsourced in 2018.  I was also leery of mentioning my male photography or my aggressive Gaythiest protesting for fear of turning off visitors who might hire me for animation, computer fixing or other work. Now I simply don't give a damn my dear, frankly.