OP-EZY Productions

In December 2005, James Crawford, Oli Harison, Shaw Eggleston and myself started working on a video for GCSE Media studies, CS-40 was the final outcome of this. We started this whilst we were still running the radio station (the later pages show "©2005 OP-EZY International Productions" on the bottom of the page). An early version of the CS-40 site can be found here:

Click here to see the early CS-40 page created during the OP-EZY International Pirate Radio days.

The radio station was shut down after one of the Teachers said it was a bit risky and could possibly land me in jail for webcasting copyrighted music without a licence. I thought Tom's excuse of "well, it's just a music player with a really long set of headphones attached to it" wouldn't hold up well in court!

So, after the station was shut down, Tom Bullimore left OP-EZY (though, he was still credited on the "About OP-EZY page") and Shaw Eggleston took his place. We decided to just keep focusing on the CS-40 video for GCSE Media studies. To make the video look more professional, I registered the "op-ezy.co.uk" domain name, and continuted hosting the site on that name.

Version 2.0

This version of the site introduced the OP-EZY Productions Intro logo, this was also used on the final CS-40 DVD which I submitted to the Media Studies department. Flash was used for the logo, the banner logo, and the navigation system. Once again, this caused no end of greif for users browsing on mobile devices.

There was going to be a few pages dedicated to installing and using a Linux based system, which never got finished, this remains on the main site to this day, if you know where to look for it!

Only the last update of version 2.0 was archived, which announced that the server would soon be switching to Slackware 10.2, and that because the new Operating System was being downloaded via the same bandwidth, the site may perform slower than usual!

Version 3.0

With a new Operating System came a new OP-EZY. Shaw and Oli left, leaving just me and James to decide on OP-EZY's future. We had the brilliant idea of becoming an electronic goods resaler. We redesigned the main OP-EZY page (although, this never really got finished, hence why it looks like a building site!) and focused on creating a site for our electronics business (FACTOID: Version 3 was based on the OP-EZY Electronics page).

Version 3 was the first to include a banner advert. This was put up just to show our support for the system we were running on the server, we didn't get any money for putting it there.

The intro animation was our new "FOX Style" logo, which had a nice skip-to-site button for people who couldn't bother waiting for the animation to load. This also had an in-joke about "Farmer John" (Oli), who would always say "Kegabyte" instead of "Kilobyte"!

Also, you may notice two links of interest, first one being "The Real PCHS", which was another OP-EZY production attempt, based on an idea by our old Systems and Contol teacher (Nick MacGregor) on how bad our school had become after apointing the new head teacher. This produciton failed due to, lack of equipment, and being able to film without getting expelled!

The other link, is "DSM-SOM" (dead link), which was James's hosted site, for his Dad's driving school. As of 26th Novmember 2010 the site is still down.

Like I said earlier, as we were focusing on our Electronics business idea, the main site was a bit of a building site, and was never quite finished. This is what the site might have looked like, if it was ever finished.

OP-EZY Electronics

The OP-EZY Electronics site had a flash animation in the centre of the page, this acted as a news feed, as well as a place to show off new products.

The "Anna" mentioned, in the midst of the bad spelling, was a girl who went to my school, who agreed to model on the site, holding various products, closer to the time of going live. Sadly, for the company, the first, and only, batch of goods we recieved, (a batch of Motorolla Bluetooth Headsets), turned out to be counterfeit, and were supplied with dangerous mains adaper chargers, (all exploaded during Quality Control checks, even though rated as being able to handle european 230V power supplies). This expensive setback stopped the business idea going live, meaning, that also, this site was never fully completed!

Version 3.1 (Unreleased)

In an effort to finish 3.0, I decided to do some modifications, after reading about how using Tables to build a site structure was a very bad idea. This designed totally failed, as I was still new at building sites with Cascading Style Sheets. Looking back, I can safely say that the Version 3 series of OP-EZY was an epic failure!