Previous Site Designs

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

April 2006

This one lasted nine months. All of the design elements got packed into a free-floating vertical rectangle, and I started using more graphics. The sidebar wasn't used particularly well on non-blog pages.

August 2004

A minimalist phase that lasted a couple of years — whilst I still like the brushed metal effects, for the follow-up I decided to try a palette with more life and provide more opportunities for people to give feedback.

May 2004

My first attempt at a column-based design, bogged down visually with a lot of lines. The navigation improved a fair bit, though, and more feedback features were added. The tagline is part of a favourite Hunter S. Thompson 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, though, the site slowly converted most of its functionality to PHP.

June 2002

Flames still in the new notebook style and a rather crowded front page, but scripted nav bars are in place. Drilling down from an index was typical of many small sites before SSI in the form of PHP outpaced use of expensive proprietary tools such as Cold Fusion.

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, 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.