Previous Site Designs

Taking a look back through the designs this place has had;

The site is still designed to accommodate 800x600, and my approach to 'design' is to latch onto one or more visual elements and build everything else around that. Fuck it, it works...

February 2009

Tweaked on an ongoing basis. The background started off grey, the sidebar flirted with being a solid fill, various shadows were tried to add definition and even an underwater effect background. The main constant was the stylised lettering used for the site name, which this screen grab records.

April 2006

This one lasted less than a year. All of the design elements got packed into a free-floating vertical rectangle, and I started using more graphics. The sidebar was only really used on blog pages. There's no appreciable font smoothing on these images because they date from a Windows 2000 system.

August 2004

A minimalist phase that lasted a couple of years. For the follow-up I decided to mix in more colour.

May 2004

My first attempt at a column-based design, bogged down visually with a lot of lines. The navigation improved a bit, though, and more feedback features were added. The (recurring) tagline is part of a favourite HST quote.

March 2004

The site got its own domain and a new name about a year before this, but the same basic layout was kept for a long time. Behind the scenes the site converted most of its functionality to PHP.

June 2002

Flames still in the new notebook style and a rather crowded front page, but (Javascript) scripted nav bars are in place. Drilling down from an index was typical of many small free-hosted sites without the ability to use server-side code.

November 2000

Flames combined with a notebook style and quite a bright colour palette, mostly due to the links drawing people immediately away from the site. It was also painfully variable width; most content just doesn't work that way.

April 1999

This is the earliest version of the site I can find on disc anywhere, which was based on some simple fixed-width table code initially done on an Acorn A3020 — I'm proud to have never used frames on the main site.

Whilst reasonably attractive for the era, the white-on-black was hard to read, and the static code hard to update. It wasn't until 2001 that any automation came in — even the gimmicky pop-up site map in this version was hardcoded.