Remember back in March 1997 when Marshall Applewhite and his Heaven's Gate cult committed mass suicide in order to leave Earth for a space craft that was trailing the comet Hale-Bopp? Well, they had a website at http://www.heavensgate.com/ to explain to the rest of us why they had to off themselves.
Someone's been keeping that site online, because it remains in tact as it was that day in 1997. Here's their press release issued March 22, 1997. I like the catchy title: "HEAVEN'S GATE® "Away Team" Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space".
I'm a web guy, meaning I do digital marketing and create and maintain quite a bit of web infrastructure. In fact, I started doing this shortly after the Heaven's Gate site was last updated, so it's easy to spot the difference between sites then and now.
No Google Analytics or Other Tracking Scripts
Viewing the source, it's strange to see HTML without some sort of analytics scripting for measuring visitors. Sure, the site's server will still have log files that can be parsed, but what site in 2012 doesn't have a Google Analytics script embedded, or StatCounter, or whatever. Tracking codes are everywhere.
<meta name="keywords" content="EVERYTHING">
Back in 1997, this is how site gamed the popular search engines of the time. We're talking Yahoo!, Excite, AltaVista, Lycos and the like. Heaven's Gate loaded up on keywords, including the terms "Jesus" and "God" six times each.
No CSS
Today, the majority of a site's mark-up happens in the CSS. CSS is how colours are changed, font sizes and styles manipulated and basically all decoration is handled. In 1997, everything was done in the HTML. The body tag, for example, looks like this: <body bgcolor="#000000" background="img/tile.jpg" text="#33ffcc" link="#cc99ff" vlink="#66cccc" alink="#ff0066">
.htm Files
Blame Microsoft for this one. Today you don't see many .htm files, but in 1997 that's what Microsoft created instead of .html. Perhaps Heaven's Gate used FrontPage or another Microsoft editor.
Hidden On-Page Keywords
In 1997, search engines weren't as sophisticated, so you could game them but putting keywords on your site that were the same colour as your background. To the visitor they were invisible, but to the search engines of the time, they were indexed as normal HTML text. Heaven's Gate has a bunch of these keywords in the footer of their home page, but you'll have to select the text to see them.
Check this out!
<font size="0" color="#000000">Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels end end times times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times </font size>
<font size="0" color="#000000">Key Words: (for search engines) 144,000, Abductees, Agnostic, Alien, Allah, Alternative, Angels, Antichrist, Apocalypse, Armageddon, Ascension, Atheist, Awakening, Away Team, Beyond Human, Blasphemy, Boddhisattva, Book of Revelation, Buddha, Channeling, Children of God, Christ, Christ's Teachings, Consciousness, Contactees, Corruption, Creation, Death, Discarnate, Discarnates, Disciple, Disciples, Disinformation, Dying, Ecumenical, End of the Age, End of the World, Eternal Life, Eunuch, Evolution, Evolutionary, Extraterrestrial, Freedom, Fulfilling Prophecy, Genderless, Glorified Body, God, God's Children, God's Chosen, God's Heaven, God's Laws, God's Son, Guru, Harvest Time, He's Back, Heaven, Heaven's Gate, Heavenly Kingdom, Higher Consciousness, His Church, Human Metamorphosis, Human Spirit, Implant, Incarnation, Interfaith, Jesus, Jesus' Return, Jesus' Teaching, Kingdom of God, Kingdom of Heaven, Krishna Consciousness, Lamb of God, Last Days, Level Above Human, Life After Death, Luciferian, Luciferians, Meditation, Members of the Next Level, Messiah, Metamorphosis, Metaphysical, Millennium, Misinformation, Mothership, Mystic, Next Level, Non Perishable, Non Temporal, Older Member, Our Lords Return, Out of Body Experience, Overcomers, Overcoming, Past Lives, Prophecy, Prophecy Fulfillment, Rapture, Reactive Mind, Recycling the Planet, Reincarnation, Religion, Resurrection, Revelations, Saved, Second Coming, Soul, Space Alien, Spacecraft, Spirit, Spirit Filled, Spirit Guide, Spiritual, Spiritual Awakening, Star People, Super Natural, Telepathy, The Remnant, The Two, Theosophy, Ti and Do, Truth, Two Witnesses, UFO, Virginity, Walk-ins, Yahweh, Yeshua, Yoda, Yoga,</font size>
No Favicon in that Tiny Head
The <head> part of Heaven's Gate's HTML is quite small compared to today's sites. There's no DOCTYPE declaration or encoding. And throw in the fact there's no Favicon or CSS or JavaScripts and you have a very tiny head.
But my favourite part of the preserved Heaven's Gate website is their page about suicide. It seems they were against it.
