So it’s no secret that, early on, I LOVED to redesign my site. I’d do it every other month if I had time. It was really fun for me to come up with new stuff and figure out how to build it.
In fact this post isn’t really about my “favourite” site designs. It’s about ALL my site designs, just because that’s what I feel like doing, LOL.
I got my start learning basic HTML on my original AOL site. And then when I moved over to my own host, I quickly realized I wasn’t really held down by what the AOL site editor could do anymore. Throughout 1999 and 2000, I redesigned my site a gazillion times, plus building other little mini-sites and blog layouts, and whatever else I could come up with. For most of them I took screencaps and saved them…. unfortunately some of them I didn’t. (I probably DO still have the HTML files for all those lost pieces… but in most cases the images are lost!)
And when I was re-adding all my old blog posts to my current site… trying to match up which design went with “I’ve updated the site!” was incredibly hard, LOL. And sometimes I did special art for the designs, and trying to plug in what dates those should be back-posted to was really difficult. But then! I recently found my old “Web Designs” portfolio page from around 2003 that gave names and dates for EVERYTHING, so I’ve finally got them all in order and tagged. But I say all this to say – if there’s some date discrepancies in my blog, that’s why. I’ll try to fix them later on down the road.
Anyway let’s start at the beginning.
The first site layout I ever took a screencap of was from mid-to-late 1998:
This design was called “To The Moon” and it has… a lot of art on it that I don’t have anymore. The SD Sephiroth, the chibi Shadowcat, that Morrigan in the link bar… I haven’t been able to find any of that š The biggest threat to old artwork was that I’d run out of webspace and just delete stuff I wasn’t using anymore… and this early in the game I wasn’t backing up art the way I should have been. So stuff got lost in the shuffle. But as you can see, in addition to my artwork, I also had a Ryouga (Ranma 1/2) and an X-Men mini-site at the time.
(This is really like personal archaeology for me, it’s so intriguing because some of this stuff I don’t remember at all.)
This one was called “Time After Time” and I have it noted as being active November 1998 to Jan 1999. It was pretty simple and each time I updated, I switched out the main picture with new art. This is another one where the art featured is now lost… I have no idea who that character was or what it was for.
“Us and Them” from Jan-Feb 1999. This is one where all I have screencapped of it is a very small desktop grab.
I was super inspired by Japanese fanart pages for this one, especially with the pastel flower background. But I never really cared for it (likely why I don’t have a decent screencap).
I renamed my site “Bad Candy” with this update – this design was called “Suspicious” and lasted Feb-April 1999. This was another one where the image at the top rotated out depending on what new art I’d just done. And for whatever reason, I saw this design get copied quite a bit?! I don’t even know.
As you can see the Ryouga and X-Men mini-sites have gone away… but the carp club is still there. Whatever the hell that was.
SunDowner Version 1 — at this point, my comic needed its own website, so the first iteration of it was really heavily based on what Bad Candy looked like at the time (above).
This was “Paranoid” and it was up a short time – April-May 1999. It was a variation on the previous design, just with a frame added and everything jumbled around. And as usual the main image was switched out each time I updated.
This one was my first time using frames… and also notice I had a MIDI player in the bottom corner. LOL. I had so many midis.
And there’s been a Gourry mini-site added… and a site dedicated to my Winamp skins!! I don’t have of those anymore…. I did manage to find this in the internet archive that actually shows a couple of them.
“Comfortably Numb” was active May-June 1999. It seems like it was around a lot longer than that?! This layout was easy to work with and I always liked it, so I’m not sure why it got dumped so fast. The Britan art on the front page was part of the layout and didn’t switch out — but I LOST that artwork for a long time, only recently found the original again.
SunDowner Version 2 – this was just a quick and dirty redesign using a sketch and plain courier text. It actually lasted nearly half a year like this even though it was supposed to be temporary.
A design called “San Tropez” was next, lasted June-August 99. But the only screencap I have of it is ridiculously tiny. But I remember it quite well – it was some purple flowers with the text overlaid on top. Super simple.
“Ego” lasted August-October 1999. It was a image-based table menu with Madison from my comic SunDowner front and center. I liked the black/white/blue combo.
Note I pared the menu WAY down. This actually happened with San Troupez (above), first… I was tired of having a gazillion links on the main page. All my other sites were still there, they were just under “Other” now.
In 1999 Ash and I decided to make a Star Wars mini-site, called Neurotic Jedis. I can’t even remember what all we had on this site – some of my fanart, of course, and I think about Ash’s Star Wars toy collection. And at some point that stupid Dey wanna wanga page was in there too.
This page stayed like this for the couple of years it existed – I don’t think it ever got changed out or… even updated. LOL.
SunDowner Version 3 – this went up sometime in late 1999. Again very simple but at least some colour unlike the temporary black and white version that preceded it.
“Revolutionist” was around Oct-Dec 1999. I was super into Utena at the time, if you couldn’t tell. This one was also super simple, just tables and text links. But I liked the simplicity of it, and red was a colour I rarely used so this was a fun diversion.
This was another minisite – this one was dedicated to Bart of Xenogears. Much like the other mini-sites, it got created and left like that until I finally deleted it at some point. I think this one lasted a good year maybe?
Also at one point I had enough sites — my main site, my blog, my star wars site, bart site, winamp site, etc that I made my own webring and I had it at the bottom of each page, LOL. “Kell’s Happy Internet Tour”
“How Many More Times” was up December-Jan 2000. Some Star Wars art on the menu, some stars (because I always liked stars)… and for some reason this simple looking little design consisted of 11 frame sets?! I have no idea why, but that’s what my notes about it say. It was apparently a pain in the butt to update because of that, which is why it didn’t last long.
This one was just a super quick design done to replace the previous one. I ended up HATING it and calling it “Blue Puke.” It only lasted about a month, circa Jan 2000.
SunDowner Version 4 – I never liked the previous SunDowner site design so a new one was quick to come around for early 2000. The menu on the left stayed static and the links opened in the right hand frame where the stripes are. Nothing flashy but I like it a lot.
“Midnight Vultures” was up from something like Jan-Feb 2000. Just something cute and quick to replace “Blue Puke” as soon as possible.
Here’s another mini-site – my Utena site called “Rose and Release.” I don’t really have dates written down for this one, I’m thinking it probably existed late 99-2001? It rarely got updated. I did do a LOT of digging around on ebay, various Japanese sites, etc for Utena merchandise and cataloged it in my shopping guide there. That was really the main purpose for the mini-site.
“And I’m Spent” is from Feb-April 2000. This one was nice and simple and easy to update.
SunDowner Version 5 – When I think of Sundowner’s site this is the design I think of. It lasted for most of 2000.
“Modern Love” from April-May 2000 went back to being a complicated frames set-up.
Summer of 2000 Ash and I started Astronomy Domine, a Harry Potter mini-site. This was just a simple image menu, and the stars next to each item lit up as you scrolled over (that feature carried over to most versions of this site). The background is literally just “Ego’s” background turned purple.
“Tropicalia” was only around for May 2000.
“You Give Me Fever” was up May-August 2000, and this is one of the designs that always come first to mind when I think of my old site. The screencap includes everything, but when viewed at 800×600, Piper took up the entire lefthand side of the screen, everything else you scrolled to see. I thought it was a fun design.
“Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict” was the name of this design and it was up August-Sept 2000. This held over the same striped background from the previous one but was a bit more condensed and less in-your-face than the last one.
AW son. This is technically the first version of my costume website. Cath and I decided to start a “private” Sailor Moon club that was based around the costumes we wanted to do for Halloween that year – we had tried to drag Ash and our other friends into being Sailor Moon characters with us for Halloween to no avail. But they did join the “club” whether they liked it or not. And this was the site I made for that club. “Lazy Eternity” (like “Bad Candy”) was inspired by magnetic poetry.
Super Freak Out 1, circa Oct 2000. So somehow I got ahold of the domain name vashthestampede.com. And I decided to go ahead and set it up as a separate site, and decided it would be my personal site/hub for everything else. So my blog got rolled into this site, any about me/profile stuff got moved here, and it became a hub for all of my sites.
Like I said with “Revolutionist” I rarely used red (except for Piper’s hair) in designs, so I wanted to go SUPER red with this… and I did.
“No Fiesta For You” was Bad Candy’s design for Sept 2000 – Nov 2000. This was meant to have a sort of magazine/comic style layout. I still remember people complaining about not being able to read parts of it, but all the yellow text was not important at all, just song lyrics LOL
SunDowner Version 6 – A new layout for SunDowner, circa Oct 2000 through Jan 2001. I took the same Piper illustration from “Grooving With a Pict” above and turned it black and white to fit in with this blue design.
(By the way, all the “version” dates of SunDowner are off by one. Because for some reason I never counted the first design.)
“Thick as a BricK” was Bad Candy’s design for Nov 2000 – Jan 2001. I still remember how much trouble I had with the image table for this one… I could NOT get the right side of Piper to stay in place. It would sometimes pop out of alignment LOL. But I always liked this colour combo.
Winter 2000, Astronomy Domine got a new look, this time in blue. I always was really drawn to a frame acting as a sidebar, like here and a few of my other layouts.
And OMG who remembers this pixel-y font?!? It was EVERYWHERE back then, like it seemed every fansite was using this font.
Super Freak Out 2 – My hub site needed to be simplified – I actually always liked this one, the SunDowner picture was long and moved down as you scrolled. This one was up Nov 2000 thru March 2001.
Also I totally forgot my blog’s name was Monkeysticks for a while. That was a joke between me and Ash, we’d always try to get each other to go to McDonald’s and order “monkeysticks.”
Speaking of Monkeysticks, here’s what it looked like. Nothing fancy, it stayed super simple for a long time.
Lazy Eternity, our Sailor Moon “club”, became our cosplay site in early 2001. Originally it was me, Ash and Cath’s site all together, we were a “cosplay group.”
The design was super inspired by a lot of the Japanese cosplayer’s sites I looked at back then.
“Instant Karma” was the Bad Candy site design for Jan – March 2001. It was only a front page redesign; all of the subpages were still the same as “Thick as a Brick.”
I got so sick of this one.
Astronomy Domine for Spring 2001. I need something a little more user-friendly, so the frames-design got simplified. The light-up stars still carried over.
SunDowner Version 7 – this was up 2001-2002 or so I believe, I don’t have firm dates on this one. I always really liked this one, it was a cute design.
Super Freak Out 3 – I still really liked the grey and white tones I’d used on the previous layout, so I kept those in place for this new design. The subpages were all still the same as the previous version as well, so this was just a new front page.
By this point I’d dropped the vashthestampede.com domain name and was just using a subdomain on my own site.
Astronomy Domine’s look for late 2001/2002. This was my fav design for this site; I wanted it to look like an old book. It kept this look for over a year.
In 2002 I decided I’d had enough of the drama Astronomy Domine brought into my life (LOL) and dumped it into a free geocities site and abandoned it there for a couple of years with no new updates. I finally deleted a few years later (before geocities’ demise would have destroyed it anyway.)
San Tropez 2 – I’d already had one layout called San Tropez but I wanted to use the name again, so this became version 2 even though they weren’t all that related.
I really liked this one. It felt cozy, and it was easy to update and maintain. The front page design lasted from March – August 2001, and I believe the subpage designs lasted even longer.
Lazy Eternity’s layout for later in 2001. It was pretty much the same as before, just a little simplified and with Sakura instead of Sailor Moon.
In late 2001 Super Freak Out got it’s 4th remodel and this one was from the ground-up. Using scans from an Evangelion artbook I really loved.
And that Super Freak Out remodel marks the first time I did a full design for my blog — or at least, the first one I took a screencap of. Whisky A*Go*Go got an all new layout to match the SFO main page, using more Evangelion scans.
“Wond’ring Again” was Bad Candy’s new look for Aug 2001 – early 2002. Pop art-influenced. I also really liked the subpages for this design — the only one I have a screencap of is the art page and it’s stretched out incorrectly… but you can get the idea.
Early 2002 I wanted a new look for my blog and picked Gandalf to base a design around. I actually always really liked this one because I love green and this felt “cozy” to me.
Lazy Eternity’s new design for Jan – August2003 was again still pretty similar to the previous one, just with some added image menus.
The funny thing about this layout is that there’s an alternate version with a green frame and Ocha on the right. I’ve found bits and pieces of the design, but I can’t find where it was ever implemented or screencapped. And I can only find pieces of the design. Super strange.
“When Pigs Fly” was Bad Candy’s layout for a looong time, from late 2002 into 2003. The name came from the fact that I felt like I’d never get a new design up… I had a temporary page up for several months. This wasn’t GREAT but it was better nothing.
SunDowner Version 8 – 2002-2003ish? This was SunDowner’s last layout.
Whisky A*Go*Go – I’m pretty sure this went up late 2002ish, and stayed up until about October 2004. Using Hisao Tamaki Star Wars art. I always really liked this one.
Lazy Eternity circa 2003. Fun fact: the art nouveau framing element was scanned in from a Jack Daniels logo. LMAO.
NAME CHANGE! Bad Candy became Lunatic Dingo, something I’d wanted to do for a while.
“No Quarter” – This went up in late 2003, site just needed a new look to go with the name change. It stayed like this til late 2004.
Lazy Eternity circa 2004. This was the first time I used pics of myself in the design.
Lunatic Dingo’s last design as my art site. This one didn’t even get a name. It went up in late 2004 and stayed this way until 2009. 2009!!
2009 is when I transitioned over to kelldar.com completely (I’d been using it as forwarding for a while already) and my costume site became the main page. But I’ll get to that in a bit.
Late 2004 it was time for a blog revamp – and a new name. I renamed it “A Day at the Races” and used some Marx Brothers art. I LOVED this layout, and still do. In fact I liked it so much I took a full screencap so all of the sidebar elements are visible. This stayed my blog layout for a loooong time, there was one pink version in between this and the wordpress version I haven’t been able to reassemble – but it was pink and had a Marie Antoinette header.
If my blog is a Day at the Races, then my costume website needed to match – it became “A Night at the Opera.”
This layout was a total copy of the official Star Wars website at the time. I kept this layout for over a year even though it was a pain in the butt to update.
A Night at the Opera circa late 2006. I needed something easier to update.
A Night at the Opera circa summer 2007. The site stayed like this for a couple of years. The photo on the side rotated through several costumes.
Late 2009 I finally pulled down the old black tree design on Lunatic Dingo. I also totally moved my site to kelldar.com so it was time for a new look.
My blog also got a new look… the pink Marie Antoinette thing I mentioned earlier. I’ve found the header but haven’t been able to reassemble it for a screencap.
And then in 2010, blogger stopped allowing publishing to outside blogs. So I was in a quandary. I decided to make the leap to wordpress finally. This was my first layout and it stuck around for quite a while.
Which brings us to today!
I actually really don’t care for wordpress. I mean yeah it makes life easy, it’s easy to update my blog, it’s easy to add pages, etc. But everything just looks the same and I miss the days of making my own page and look. Unfortunately webpage coding has long since left me in the dust, and I don’t know that I’d ever be able to design a look around my wordpress stuff. So I just have to look back and enjoy the good old days and just try to keep my website looking presentable, at least.