The site went online March 2004. In just 15 months, it’s had 5 updates to the design. Because I’m someone lacking artistic vision, creating a design from nothing is actually very hard work for me. Throughout each update, I’ve always felt something was missing – I’ve never quite been happy with what I’ve produced. Especially styling links – I’ve tried many different things. I’ve now learnt a valuable lesson.
Let’s take a quick pass through the hall of shame! Right-click and ‘View Image’, ‘Show Image’ or equivilant for a larger picture if they appear too small
Design #1 was very bad indeed. I knew this at the time, but having just paid for a domain name, I wanted to get something on it as soon as possible. The quickest way of changing black text on a white background is to reverse the colours. And that’s exactly what I did.

Design #2 – the next design change introduced the now familiar blue background, and white headers. Comic Sans and that logo vanished in favour of the easier-on-the-eyes Verdana. I kept the layout of the menu.

Design #3 – this was my first attempt at revamping the menu. Somehow I don’t think the 3D-button look worked that well. This update also introduced the borders around different parts of pages. The footer got introduced as part of this design (but wasn’t part of the initial update)

Design #4 – the current design. I moved headers on top of the borders, redid the menu so it matched the footer, and also removed those orange link underlines in favour of double-black. I’m not sure which is better to be honest.

Design #5 – going live later this month (I’m still tweaking it). The menu and the buttons from the footer have moved to a new sidebar. The contents of the sidebar are only semi-opaque until you hover over them, which is an effect that works surprisingly well. The footer also remains fixed in place when you scroll. Although the available screen space for the ‘content’ is reduced, everything still fits nicely in resolutions of 1024×768 and up (currently 96% of visitors). Link styling has reverted back to the default of a single solid underline – I’ve decided that defaults are there for a reason…
This design also introduces MiniMe!

Comments welcome on the designs – both old and new…