The first board, 2004
Before the blog, the 2004 site was a single static board: four headline pages, a notice board, finding us, and named pages for the cafe, the kindergarten and the festival.
Pinned by The Notice Board · Entry checked on · 3 min
The earliest capture on this domain is July 2004, and the site it shows is a different object from the blog that followed: a single static board, built of .htm and .shtml pages, with a title strip that reads "The Church of St John the Evangelist, Aberdeen, Scottish Episcopal Church, part of the world-wide Anglican Communion." Below it, four headline links in a row: Adding an Extra Dimension, Making New Connections, Notice Board, Celebrating Rites of Passage.
A board, literally
The 2004 site did not have a blog's chronology. It had a set of named pages, each pinned once and left: the notice board itself as a page called Noticeboard.htm, the cafe and the kindergarten, the choristers and the dance studio, St Peter's and Finding Us, a page for the 3rd St John's Whitsun Festival of 2004, and an Asian Tsunami Special Report added when the disaster of December 2004 reached even a Scottish parish's notice board.
That last page is the tell of the whole era. A static site can only add what someone deliberately writes and uploads, and someone at St John's wrote a page for the tsunami: a world event pinned on a parish board because a parish board is where a community's attention lives.
What the two versions share
Put the 2004 board beside the WordPress site of 2010 to 2015 and the continuity is plain. Both led with worship times and events; both gave community a headline place; both kept the building's art and history as a subject; both treated the site as a public notice board rather than a brochure. The software changed from hand-edited pages to a blog engine, but the idea of the site did not change at all.
The smaller finds
The record also keeps the furniture of the era: shtml pages named wonder, journey, beauty, withGod, withPeople, withYou, collaboration; a St Peter's page for the daughter congregation; Finding Us for the map. Small pages, one idea each, pinned once.
Reading a static site as a record
A hand-edited site is a different kind of evidence than a blog. Nothing on it is automatic: every page exists because someone wrote it, uploaded it, and chose its place on the menu. There is no archive of drafts, no accidental posts, no sidebar that fills itself. That makes the 2004 board, for all its plainness, the more deliberate document. The four headlines in the top row are the parish's own answer to what it was for: dimension, connection, notice, passage. The blog that followed inherited all four, and this board keeps the earlier version pinned first, because it said the whole thing in a single screen.
There is one more thing the 2004 capture preserves: the word welcome. The homepage opened with it, a plain greeting to St John's, Aberdeen, and every page that followed was a working-out of that single word. The blog era kept the same posture under more machinery. This site takes its name from the page the parish itself named, Noticeboard.htm, and pins the whole first board as its own slip.
How the board files it
The whole 2004 site pinned as one slip, the first board this domain carried: four headlines, a notice board page of its own, and a decade's worth of named pages that the blog later inherited.
