Ah I long for the days when you could just use a few frames and throw an image map together for graphical navigation...
In the aftermath of the Barings bank collapse in 1995, and its purchase for £1 by ING, its private equity arm (Baring Private Equity Partners) - which was neither directly connected with the bank's activities, nor affected by them - wanted to ringfence itself from ING influence. It decided to commission a website and, I am still not sure how, I was asked to pitch for the job. I built a demo site, put it on a floppy and visited the BPEP offices to show the men in suits.
I built the site in BBEdit Lite in three or four days. As was the fashion at the time, my brief was "We want a website" and nothing more; no purpose was imagined and, other than when I asked for locations/addresses etc, no content was provided - not even for the legal notice, although this was signed-off on by their lawyers.
The site (made to be displayed 640 x 480, natch) used every sin in the canon: multiple nested frames for top menu and left-hand navigation; and, yes, it had an image map. The plan, for my part at least, was to use this as a placeholder and then move to something less embarrassing. That never happened, and I was paid to maintain my Frankenframed monster for more than a year before ING finally asserted themselves.
I've just unearthed a broken fragment from the Wayback machine [1], if anyone has the stomach to look at it. For best (!) results, follow this route map:
- The link should punt you to an obligatory legal warning page (and yes, this did necessitate duplicating the entire frame-based navigation - don't ask).
- When it loads, click on "worldwide" in the top menu. [Edit to add: the hotspots on the image map now take a while to react when you hover over them.]
- When what remains of that loads, click on the topmost orange triangle in the left-hand nav bar. That should give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole went.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000303162503/http://www.bpep.c...