Design

This site's design is quite different from anything else I've done.

Goal: minimalistic design.

I wanted this site to avoid unnecessarily decorative graphics and design elements (although I did want to leave in enough to make it at least marginally appealing!). You might think of the current design as "too texty" or "bland," but consider why I'm doing this:

• Plain sites are easier to modify. I'm lazy. If I have to make a new image (or worse, modify existing images) in order to add an area to my site, I probably won't do it -- I'll shove the content somewhere else or not add it at all.

• Plain sites download faster. I did my time on slow modems; I know what it's like to download a page with gobs of big graphics that the designer thinks are pretty.

• Plain sites don't get tiring as quickly. I've made plenty of designs that were filled with pretty pictures -- but I got tired of them after awhile, and then they were just visual clutter, so I put in some new pretty pictures ... and then those became dull ...

• Plain sites can be easier to read because there is much less to compete for your eyes' visual attention. They also scale a lot better -- go ahead, bump up the text zoom level in your browser and see what happens.

Goal: simple, standards-compliant code.

Many of my past designs have had a lot of nested tables, <font> tags, and other embarassments. I wanted this design to be clean "under the hood" as well as on the surface. You can read more about this in my Web Standards spiel.

I have fallen short of this goal -- not all semantic elements are encoded as such, my character encoding isn't perfect, and I still have two tables in this layout (because I was unable to acheive the same properties with floating divs -- read more in my web rant). It is, however, a far cry from the poor coding styles I've been guilty of in the past.

Thanks

My friend Jessica Marple (see Jessica's home page), a professional graphic designer, spent a lot of time giving me helpful feedback and thoughtful suggestions on this design's look. She was patient through several revisions, and this page wouldn't have looked nearly as nice without her advice. Thanks, Jessica!

Past designs

I've been in the Web design world for quite some time -- I was 15 when I started my first job, and I did a little Web stuff there. Here's a list of versions of my homepage, as I remember them:

One

This page was created as a "teach-myself-HTML" project at GlaxoWellcome, my first employer. I was infatuated with ANSI art at the time, and created the "ANSI Art Zone" all in one long page with a bumpy green background that looked like a sea of shredded broccoli when you scrolled. It had screenshots and reviews of my favorite ANSI graphics editors and lots of flashing buttons that said things like "Click here to download HotDog Pro!" Boy, was I cool.

Two

My first real personal homepage: a table-based layout with a black stripe down the left and cheesy expanding menus. I made all the graphics in a 1980's graphics program called Dr. Halo, with the exception of a really cool raytraced picture I made with Povray. This was during my experiment-with-C and experiment-with-electronic-music time period, so the page mostly served as an outlet for my programs and music. It was hosted at GeoCities (way back before it became Yahoo! GeoCities).

Three

A graphically intense, JavaScript-heavy, frame-based site hosted at the now-defunct site Xoom. It resulted from a temporary infatuation with mid-90's cutting-edge web design. Quickly abandoned when I realized that it looked dumb and was hard to update to boot.

Four

A simplistic black-and-white design with pictures from the Library of Congress' American Memory site as decorations. This was the first design I was ever happy with for any long period of time, and it was my homepage for quite some time while I was going to Columbia Basin College; it was hosted at Crosswinds.Net.

Five

More black and white; this one was created shortly after I began attending school at WSU Tri-Cities. It enjoyed longevity and a design that kept me happy for months, although after that I wished I'd stuck with Design Four.