eMoviePoster.com

In mid-1998 I had been running my business of both auctioning movie posters in one giant annual million dollar auction and also publishing twice or three times yearly sales catalogs since 1990. But I saw this new "World Wide Web" and I decided it was "the coming thing" and so, even though I did not know exactly HOW it would help my business, I decided to open a website!

"movieposter.com" and "movieposters.com" were already taken, of course, and so, since eBay was the hottest website around, I settled on "eMoviePoster.com" (I could have also purchased "eMoviePosters.com", and to my great regret I did not, because for the past 16 years people have accidentally gone there, looking for US, and cyber-squatters have used it as a redirect to various other sites over the years!

How to start a website? I had no clue, but my uncle, Eli Post, had recently set up a site for a company he worked for, and for an incredibly nominal fee, he agreed to do the same for me. I can't remember exactly when it was, but sometime in the late Fall of 1998, our site went "live", and it included links to the books I had published, the eBay auctions I had recently started running, a way to join this weekly email club, and more!

Here is an image of what our website looked like in December 1998 (NOTE: Click on it to view a larger version; also note that a few of the images are broken):

Note that it included a "links" page, a visitor counter, and just about everything else that seemed so "current" in 1998, but looks SO dated now. About the only thing it was missing was some "Best of the Web" Awards that so many sites bragged about back then, and that was only because our site was too new to have won any!

We also found a saved copy of our website's layout from 2008. While two of our three auction galleries were in place at that time (we had not yet added our Sunday auctions), it is obvious to see that a MASSIVE amount of improvements have been made since 2008, to our homepage, to our auction galleries and to other parts of our site.

You can see what the 2008 version of the site looked like here: http://oldstyle.emovieposter.com/. Note that this includes all the "code" from the old site; since the gallery "code" still kind of works, it actually displays galleries of our current auctions and not the 2008 ones, but we don't think it is a good idea to actually try using these old galleries as we can't guarantee they will work correctly in every way, and we don't want someone to have a problem because they used them!

Now compare the above primitive sites to our current site at http://www.emovieposter.com/ and it is obvious that there really is NO comparison at all! Over the past 16 years I have had a series of web designers (all working "in house") continually change and improve the site. The past few years I have had two super talented individuals working on the site, Aaron Kennedy and Steven Smith, and they are responsible for the many wonderful improvements you all have seen in the site (and our auctions) over that time. And we have LOTS more great improvements in the works (and of course we will announce them all here in this club first)!