BIGBEN Media

By the spring of 2003, the portal already connected a whole constellation of independent projects, each just one click away from the shared menu:

• Learn More — a site with curious and well-known facts about the world, with a built-in system that randomly picked one of more than 60 ready-made entries on every page load. The tone was lighthearted — one of the facts, for instance, was that the Moon always faces Earth with the same side.
• BIGBEN News — jokingly called the “Disinformation Daily”: daily-updated news, commentary, a horoscope, exchange rates, and a humorous tone throughout — issue 192 in the March 2003 screenshot.
• Radio BIGBEN — the network's internet radio station, already given its own page on this site.
• BIGBEN Search — the local file search engine, the radio station's sister project, also already a standalone project here.
• BIGBEN Video — the movie catalog, also already a standalone project.
• BIGBEN Server — the shared server foundation where the radio station, the search engine, and the catalog would ultimately come together.

Besides its own projects, the portal also promoted custom website development for real clients across a range of fields.

Visually, BIGBEN Media followed the fashion of the time: a dark background, table-based layout, English-language menu button labels alongside entirely Bulgarian content, and a logo styled like a printer's plate — “BIGBEN MEDIASET” rendered in blackletter type with an embossed effect.

Every page loaded through a shared HTML template, with the content itself pulled dynamically from a separate file — a primitive but working form of templating, built entirely by hand, with no ready-made CMS. In the upper-left corner of every page, a JavaScript clock displayed the current time live, and the “Portals” menu linked out to free services that were popular at the time.

Beyond introducing its author, the site also served as a business card for the custom-website service — promising a low price, a fast turnaround, and a personal approach, addressed directly to the visitor. The author's page included a brief bio and a section of references from past clients and employers — a common practice for personal pages of that era.

The portal remained active until around 2005, after which it was superseded by the next stage of development — the in-house platform that mediasetbg.com later launched on. Today, BIGBEN Media remains the first link in the site's history: the personal page that everything else grew out of.