Back in the olden days of the Internet, I approached the local CBC operation here on Prince Edward Island about doing a website for them. I was mostly concerned with them simply starting to do something — they had no web presence at the time — so I made them a deal they couldn’t refuse: I would take their materials and create a simple site for them for $150. They didn’t refuse.

Their first website, thus, was www.isn.net/cbc, hosted on the Island Service Network server. The Internet Archive cache of that page doesn’t go all the way back to the very beginning, but you can get a sense of the simplicity of the original design from the later 1998 version. I remember having to resize a lot of photos of Roger Younker and Wayne Collins. I handed things over to Mike Wile at the CBC almost immediately, and he maintained the site from there.

Of course it wasn’t much later that the CBC got organized, and a national, standardized web effort took the place of this simple local site, an effort now ably maintained locally by Mitch Cormier.

The first post-ISN version of the site was at charlottetown.cbc.ca, which later migrated to pei.cbc.ca.

This week the address changed again, this time to cbc.ca/pei. I’m sure there are important technical reasons for the change, but it’s a shame that the change involves adding a slash to the name: given the confusion about slashes and backslashes you just know that people are going to mis-hear or mis-type as cbc.ca\pei, which doesn’t work.

In any case, the change in address brings an updated new design, with some new applications (like a live radio schedule widget on the right-hand side), and some nice clean-up of some inconsistencies of the old design.