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I've had several different Web sites over the years, or at least several different appearances.
I made my first foray onto the Web in the summer of 1995, when I moved back to my folks house after finishing my undergraduate degrees. Dad introduced me to the Web, and got me an e-mail account through his job — I used Pine to read my earliest messages.
After a while I discovered GeoCities, and had my first Web site there. I no longer have my URL there, but here's basically what ti looked like when I did:
The clip art came from http://www.aon-celtic.com/ — if you go to the Clip Art in the freeware section, you can see some of what I was working with. (I'm still very fond of this site when it comes to Celtic design work.)
In the fall of 1997, I started graduate studies at Notre Dame. As a student here I had the opportunity to build a new Web page for myself, on the university's server. I've been here ever since, switching from student to employee in the summer of 2000. At first (v1.0), my site looked the same as it had at GeoCities. But then...
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v2.0 —
The Victorian Look
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Spring 2001
I'm not sure exactly what I was going for with this redesign. I wanted to get away from the arrangement of the icons in the previous version, and switched to the left-hand menu for navigation.
This design version came before I started to buy the Dover electronic fonts and images, so I was fairly limited in what I had to work with.
If you're actually interested in seeing the details of any particular version, click on the image at left and it'll open a full-size version in a new window.
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v3.0.1 —
The Art Nouveau Look: Fall
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Fall 2001
This is the first design I was really pleased with esthetically. My brilliant idea (insert dripping sarcasm here) was to create a site which changed with the seasons. I used a set of four motifs I found in a Dover book and chose four colors which felt right for each season.
So, for fall we have an orange and yellow palette, with leaves in the background of the menu and swirling about the figure in the upper left home graphic.
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v3.0.2 —
The Art Nouveau Look: Winter
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Winter 2001
And here's the version I switched to three months later: purple (or blue-ish on some monitors) with a swirling background to the menu and the figure in the home grpahic bundled amidst the snow difts.
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v3.0.3 —
The Art Nouveau Look: Spring
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Spring 2002
And here's the version I switched to three months later: shades of pink, the figure in the home graphic being showered by flower petals from a blooming tree.
An amusing – to me at least – thing occurred when I made this switch: I was expecting a child at this time, and people who visited the site thought the change from blue-ish to pink reflected a change in my desires or expectations regarding the child's gender!
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v3.0.4 —
The Art Nouveau Look: Summer
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Summer 2002
And here's the final version I switched to three months after that: greens with
...Are you starting to see why I decided to redesign the site? I was spending more time on changing the appearance than I was on content!
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v3.1.1 —
The Art Nouveau Look: Fall II
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Fall 2003
I know, I know — this looks pretty much the same as the first Fall version, above. But look closely — it's wider. I decided that restricting myself to designing for a 600 pixel screen was no longer necessary, and expanded to an 800 pixel width design.
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