The DOA was originally created as a DVD and home theater site for owners and users of the Divx home video system. By the fall of 1999, some 400,000 Divx-compatible players had been produced, yet there were no Internet sites left offering Divx advice and assistance; the site was intended to fill that gap. Along with the times, its mission has evolved, and today the DOA is primarily concerned with general DVD, home theater, and film-related topics, although the Divx resource content will remain (in its own section).

The DOA was founded in July, 1999, shortly after Divx was pulled from the market. The site was originally created by the Webmaster of Digital Disc World, with content limited to a single page, and the name chosen with a tongue-in-cheek attitude with regard to the acronym its initials formed. In the late summer of 1999, I took over all responsibility for maintenance and upgrades for the site. Web design was a new challenge for me, and other commitments sharply restricted the amount of time I had available to work on the site, but finally, on December 20, 1999, a stripped-down DOA version 2.0 finally went online, hosted in the private Web space provided by my ISP.

The empty pages on DOA slowly filled out, and by the spring of 2000, there were several content pages in addition to the News and Editorial Page, including the FAQ, the list of titles released to Divx, a discs-for-sale page, and the Exclusives page. In June of 2000, the discs-for-sale page was replaced by a Reviews page.

Visibility-wise, the DOA quickly acquired notoriety amongst the home theater set, but listings amongst the major search engines were slow in coming, and for the first weeks of its existence, visitors were scarce. After several months, the site had just begun appearing in searches on Alta Vista and Lycos, when my ISP changed all its user home page URLs, breaking all of DOA's painstakingly-established search engine links, and setting its visibility back to near zero. After that debacle, I changed ISPs, bought a domain and hosting space, and scrambled to re-establish the search engine links. After a few months, they were restored and more added, and the site was listed with Jim Taylor's DVD FAQ, with the result that by the summer of 2000, visits to DOA had had risen to a very respectable level for a hobby site.

In July of 2000, Divx was finally noticed by some former and then-current Divx employees, who were quite pleased to find that someone amongst the many users of the product had re-established a fan site presence. After this, resources related to the product began arriving in my e-mail Inbox from time to time, from anonymous donors. Neither Circuit City nor Divx (which I think was defunct by this time) ever officially acknowledged the site. An e-mail to Circuit City on the subject received nothing more than an automated response, which was never followed through on.

In early 2001, the plain appearance of the site was becoming more and more obvious, especially after the old ProDivx.com and Absolute Divx sites reappeared (the first only briefly). This prompted work to start on a new Version 3 of the site; by then, having worked a stint as a professional web developer for a dot-com, I was much better prepared to tackle this challenge than when I had created v2. Within a few weeks, v3 was finished and deployed. Cosmetically, v3 was a huge improvement over v2, and finally, the DOA shed its "hobby site" look for a professional one with crisp graphics, neatly formatted text, and a new logo. V3 also arrived just in time for the site's first appearance in the national press, where it was featured in a story in The Washington Post on the last days of Divx.

For the next year and a half, content additions were made occasionally, including a short Divx history and an explanation of the Divx system that had been part of an article I wrote for Tech TV, but there were no major revisions until late September of 2002, with the appearance of v4. V4 replaced the old side menu with a top menu bar, and to accomodate users with high screen resolutions, the page width was fixed. The new improvements did not go unnoticed, and in October of 2002, the DOA received a Golden Web Award from the International Association of Web Masters and Designers. The once tongue-in-cheek hobby page had come a long way from its humble beginnings.

This brings us to the present, with the DOA now having marked four years online. New features, including some general DVD-related resources and improved site functionality, have been added and more are in the works. When we founded this site, we never expected it to last this long, longer, in fact, than many of its detractors. Where the future will lead is anyone's guess, but with luck, hard work and perseverence, the DOA will be around to serve the online community for years to come.

V1 (Version 1) of the DOA was created with the online WYSIWIG editor provided by Homestead.com. Our graphics creating skill was extremely limited, and the few images we used were filched from other sites. Our first logo was created from one used by the short-lived ProDivx.com site. V1 was a modest effort, and the site had a very low profile (it barely gathered 100 visits during its lifetime).

V2 was a significant improvment over v1, introducing the basic structure of all DOA versions to date. The WYSIWIG editor gave way to a professional HTML editor that allowed for proper formatting of text and alignment of graphical images. V2 pages were also designed to fill the entire screen window by expanding the center section depending on the screen resolution, a technique employed by production-quality sites. Originally designed to render properly only with Internet Explorer, v2 was eventually enhanced to display properly with Netscape 4.X and above as well. In addition to the improved formatting, unlike the simple, single page of its predecessor, v2 offered a considerable amount of site content, organized in a hierarchical structure, including a FAQ, a list of titles released to the format, and a links page. However, v2 still suffered from a drab color scheme, with almost no graphics. There were other glaring deficiencies, too, including a need for better text formatting on the FAQ page and more elaboration for the entries on the Links page. Basically, the v2 design built on v1, adopting its basic layout, changing the color scheme, and adding content.

V3 was the first version with a professional look-and-feel. Gone was the drab color scheme, replaced by easy-viewing gray text with blue pastel headings, a patterned menu bar with menu rollovers, and eventually, an new logo to replace the one "stolen" from ProDivx.com 2 years before. The FAQ page text was reformatted, and the number of entries on the Links page was expanded, and each entry was given a brief description. For the first time, the DOA was finally on a par, appearance-wise, with the big name DVD sites. Influences on v3 were DVD Talk (the pastel headings), ProDivx.com (the Verdana font and text color, and the rollovers on the menu bar), and Absolute Divx (the menu bar with background graphic, the FAQ page formatting, the Links entries format, and the Top10Picks on the side bar.

V4, the current version, introduced several ergonomic changes. The page size was fixed and centered, with any surplus window area being taken up by a blue crosshatch pattern. The side menu bar was replaced with one at the top, and the logo was centered in a blue band that stretched across the top of the page. Dotted margins were introduced to differentiate the side bars from the center section which contained the main content. V4's new improvements were heavily influenced by the Pixel Junction graphics site (which inspired the crosshatch pattern on the sides, the top menu bar, and the dotted lines marking the side menus.