http://music-elsewhere.hypermart.net

The intro page of Maaike's re-boot of the Music & Elsewhere website, circa the latter half of 2000

... we got a website. Well, apparently. I can't have a look at it yet, not till NTL have been. Oh, and this is probably gonna mean some new phone numbers too, but we should be keeping the current one till at least the end of this year. Our "snailmail" (trendy computer term I picked up) address won't change though, pretty promise. Actually, Pete Program said I could go in a Cybercafe and look at our website, but I told him I don't drink electronic coffee. Um... oh, right, I was talking about the website; well, obviously, it wasn't me that created it (no shit!), but twas one of our erstwhile M&E supporters, Maaike De Laat, bless her, out there in Neder-Nederlands, and we love her muchly for it. Kissy kissy. Lord Litter likes it, we hear. We're still talking about the website here, trust me. And it'll be the first Internet address I ever "surf" (getting the hang of this, aren't I?), of course. Then I'll radion another site, then daz some more.

Reproduced from the Fall '99 edition of the M&E Newsletter - especially in the Courier New font, in loving memory of my old typewriter. RIP. Sob...

As luck would have it, just recently, Maaike found that elusive back-up copy of the latter version of the site and sent it to me. Call me a nostalgic old fool, but I thought it would be nice to reassemble some

of it on The Magic Net and share some memories over a nice gin and tonic. I asked Maaike what initially inspired her to create a website for M&E and how the design evolved from the earlier version;

"Well, I was in art school studying graphic design and I was really interested in web design, so I was looking for projects to work on, to get some practice. I wanted to build a website that was actually useful, rather than just another fake project. I thought it was too bad that an international phenomenon such as M&E wasn't online, so there you go! The original design was made to fit in as much as possible with the printed M&E stuff. I did the other one simply because I felt like experimenting with another style, nothing deep ;-) This was back in 2000 and in those days creating layouts for the web was pretty hard, we didn't have the tools (such as CSS) we have now."

This was, of course, right at the beginning of Maaike's dabblings in web
design, so I also asked if perhaps she could tell us a bit about how her career had progressed and what she's up to present day;

"I'm still designing websites. After freelancing as a graphic designer
for some time I now work for a company in Utrecht called Eend ('Duck'). Our tagline is 'Making the internet more human' - we're specialized in designing sites that are easy to use. This means that besides working on the computer, I spend quite a lot of time talking to people, interviewing users etc. Which is fun! But I have never again had a client that was as much rock & roll as M&E :-)"

Oh, isn't she a sweetheart? Needless to say, those efforts were very much appreciated, and it's kinda nice to be able to revisit the fruits of her labours in the here and now. So, pour yourself a drink, get comfy in your chair and prepare to revisit those years of irritating pop-up ads and the infamous blue screen of death...