In the summer of 2003 during my school holidays, I started my first website. I was a complete novice; I had only started programming and designing a short time before. It was hosted on 'FreeWebsites' and contained small but enthusiastic coverage for a game I had just played. That game was Final Fantasy VII and that website was called Final Fantasy Ultima.

At the end of the year I purchased my first ever hosting package and purchased my first ever domain - ffultima.net. More on that later.
Over the next few years I spent my time lovingly adding to my coverage of the Final Fantasy series as well as refining my design and web development skills with multiple reskins of my template. By the end of the year, Final Fantasy Ultima had become an established - albeit still small - part of the fansite community.

2005 is when everything went up a gear. I was beginning to accelerate my web development career, despite still being in high school. The site was growing. Record hits were achieved numerous times throughout the years and I had started to affiliate with some of the bigger sites. I was collaborating with other site owners and learning from them.

Back in 2003 I started my first website. The enthusiasm with which I worked on it, a novice programmer and novice designer, would up inspiring the career I have enjoyed since. That first website was called Final Fantasy Ultima.

By 2004, Final Fantasy Ultima was an established part of the community. At its peak in 2006, the site experienced such a level of traffic that it ended up experiencing downtime because it was outgrowing the hosting package I had! Unfortunately in 2006 I finished high school and all the many perks of higher education and my entry into the real world put an end to the mounds of free time a high schooler had to maintain the site.

In 2010, with my mind and career having far outgrown its roots, I let the original domain go.

The internet sure has changed a lot since then, and arguably not entirely for the better. I find myself being repeatedly frustrated by just how corporate everything is nowadays - subscriptions this, advertising that, all with a healthy sprinkling of privacy invasion.

Does it really have to be that way?

I was looking through my external harddrive and found almost all of the original files from my original site, with nearly everything there. The only thing noticably missing was the news (not a huge loss, given how old that would actually be) and the media. The media - every Final Fantasy soundtrack, video, all the artwork through to and including the first Final Fantasy XIII - is a huge loss.

But I thought... Why not work on the site again? What's the harm, right?

The aim of this project is to see just how far I can take the site that started it all for me in a modern web landscape. How high can I get its ranking? How popular will it become? It had been quite a few years since I have maintained a website for the purpose of fun rather than work, and nowadays most of my programming involves working on games.

So welcome (back) to Final Fantasy Ultima, which probably never was and never will be, 'The Ultima Resource', but heck, we'll have fun with it anyway! The design is more or less a carbon copy of the new version I was working on in 2009 that never saw the light of day. I've tidied it up to fit modern standards and done everything I can to make it look comparatively modern, but at its core, this is exactly how my website would have looked had I continued maintaining it.

I will work my way through each section transpiling my old content, as most of it is unformatted in text dumps and does require a bit of work to get up to speed. In honour of my first complete section that I finished back in 2004, I will be starting with Final Fantasy X-2

I hope you enjoy yourself!