October 2000
This was the very first version of The Sonic Stadium. I started working on this website round about March-May 2000, and worked from basic HTML, which I learned from a book. I found this book in my school library (I was in Year 10 at the time!) that was in large print and simple speak, but it taught the basics well, and I got started. 6 months down the line, of working on-and-off it between school hours, and on the 24th October 2000, the world saw the start of a revolution in Sonic the Hedgehog websites… although you couldn’t tell at the time.

Despite it’s simplicity, this is perhaps my favourite old design, and, being the first, will always hold a ceremonial place in my heart ^_^ – So here it is, the first ever Sonic Stadium, complete with early schoolboy Dreadknux speak!

February 2001
In retrospect, I don’t know why I put borders on those tables around the navigation links on each side of the page. It would have looked a lot better without them. Oh well. I was with blood-sucking vampires STAS.net at this time, which resulted, in the end, with my site being lost. But there you go. Had some good times. Like the Sonic Adventure 2 madness that surrounded this version.

The announcement mentions the first pieces of fan work for the newly born Sonic Fan Club, and memorably (for me anyway) I had to take time off of TSS for my GCSE exams (GCSEs are British High School final exams). June would be my birthday (and Sonic’s), and with STAS down the crapper, I promised a brand new look for visitors in that month – after my exams… STAS.net, Hostonce, Equivity… are these all by the same company? 😛

June 2001
This was the new look The Sonic Stadium presented to everyone come June. This was released with the advent of the first ever Sonic Site Awards, an event that has since become the biggest online Sonic event of the year! Aside from some layout issues, I really do admire how this look captured the airy feel of Sonic the Hedgehog.

I had a bright background and a light and airy atmosphere, and TSS has had that kind of feel since. This marked the turning point of The Sonic Stadium, as it started to get popular and noticed… I may just revive aspects of this design for future reminsicing… you never know.

August 2001
A few months after the new look in June, I came across a funky new background to use for the site – I came across it by accident, Sonic and Shadow as silhouettes. I thought the background was quite cool, so I changed the pages to suit that new image.

Aside from that though, this is pretty much the same type of format as Layout 3 has been. It was also the point where I would apparently just talk, talk and talk until you lot fell asleep. Ah well.

October 2001
This was the point in which I got a little more sensible about the page layout, and applied what I knew about visitor feedback to make The Sonic Stadium a better place. In this instance, many pages before this layout were in “open space” as it were, so the width of the screen resolution would stretch and make the text or content go funky.

For this layout I began to make tables and physical borders around the content so that it looked a lot tidier. This particular main page was used for a time, until I thought about using double navigation bars again…

Shadow of a Hedgehog Stadium – October 2001 (Canned)
Yes, it almost happened. Neon Chaos from Shadow of a Hedgehog and myself from The Sonic Stadium got to talking one time and mused about a possible merging. I built a demo page, that you can see to the left, of which both layouts were fused together so that both sites could be seen from this collaboration. It fell through however, with Neon and I losing both interest and feeling we would try to underpin each other.

It’s turned out for the better really – because instead of a slim chance of one merged site becoming successful, two distinctly different Sonic sites have grown to be immensely popular – and at the end of the day, Neon and I wouldn’t have it any other way

November 2001
If you look at it, this site has had the most number of unnecessary changes in this half of 2001 hasn’t it? Nonetheless, a poll was setup some time back to choose between this two-bar layout or the single-bar layout that had been setup some time before. The decision was the two-bars, and that’s what you got… until I changed it again, heehee.

TSS missed out on celebrating the Christmas period in it’s first year, so it made up for it in 2001 with a warm Christmas greeting on the main page. Needless to say, the ‘See ya in SA3′ was a mere fun quip of mine, something I wrote without a second thought. Imagine the number of emails I got asking me if Sonic Adventure 3 really was in the making…

January 2002
This was just about the last public layout made in the first half of 2002, due to a merging between Sonic News and The Sonic Stadium coming into fruition, that began in April. I had another layout to use for TSS (which is mentioned in the update on the layout image – that update is in March), but that never got used.

Pages outside the main page were getting more and more inspired by Sonic News: the side navigation bar on each sub-page is a direct homage to the simple-yet effective navigation that Sonic News’ old site used to have.

March 2002 (Canned)
If we’re numbering all of these layouts thus far, we’d be on our eighth design here, but we like to call this one 7.9 instead. Why 7.9? Well, this layout actually ended up being redundant by May – when Sonic_Hedgehogs from Sonic News came to me with a proposal to merge Sonic News and The Sonic Stadium together.

Intrigued but still wary of the outcome of a possible merger, I agreed and, although this design for The Sonic Stadium was no longer needed, aspects of it was used for the general design of the newly merged website, The Sonic Stadium News Group [SSNG].

SSNG [Sonic Stadium News Group] Layout 0.3 – April 2002 (Canned)
I got to working on a sample page for the launch date of SSNG, which would have been 23rd June 2002 – Sonic’s birthday. This page would be used on all pages, with it’s navigation bar on the left and a main content section on the right.

This is the birth of what you now see on The Sonic Stadium’s pages, and was SSNG’s first main page look. We didn’t like it after a while, so you know what we did? Do you? Eh? Yeah, we got rid of it.