The Hyperlands web site has been around for a long time,
well for a web site any way. Something like 6 years or so.
It's history is very long, difficult to understand and
quite frankly boring! Also the only person that has a
chance of knowing it (me!) can't remember all of it. So
there!
Anyway what I do have is most (84%) of the old web sites
archived away. Okay that's only 4 different web sites hay
84% sounds good. The first version of Hyperlands is now
sadly lost in the mists of time. For sites that I still
have you can view a gallery of static images of the front
page of the site here.
I'll use this page to critique and analyse my web design (I
know that sounds boring, but then there is always the
back button).
Hyperlands 1
Hyperlands 1 was basic. I didn't know much
about html and it was the late 90's so layout (such as it
was) was done with tables (hand crafted). I had a 3 by 3
table filling the screen width. In the center square of
each side I the link to one of the sections of the site. If
I recall correctly the sections where @90 degrees to
reality, lightpath gallery, digital anthill and jumpgate.
Hyperlands
2
Some time between Hyperlands 1 and 2 I discovered
Macromedia Fireworks. Hence the site still relied on tables
for layout, but things where a lot more complex because of
Fireworks, which at the time I through was fantastic! The
problem with this is shown in the screen shot. In a modern
browser (Camino on a mac), you get rendering errors and the
precise alignment of the tables needed to get the images to
fit doesn't always work out. Worse still I took some images
out the table and put text in there place. This would look
awful if some one where to use a larger than normal font
setting in their browser. We also gained two new sections
world view (now defunct) and buffers guide (likewise
defunct, but may see the light of day again at some point
in the future).
Hyperlands
3
Time moves on and Hyperlands changes again. This time
nearly all of the content of the form Hyperlands, was moved
to my (then) new site Cool-aardvark (it's still mine, but it
seems to have drifted off to an alternate universe,
filled with ant eating mega rock stars!) . Design wise
big changes also, but 'under the hood' very little
change. Still table based layout, still done with
Fireworks (which was fading rapidly in my eyes at this
point). More hand tweaking of the html was done, which
made me wonder why I was using fireworks to generate
the html in the first place! The cult archives was
home to bits from the buffers guide and some other
episode guides for other shows. None of these episode
guides where completed (most never even got more than
a holding page). Patchwork universe was a totally
still born idea, that I'd rather forget (so you wont
get any more from me on it!).
Hyperlands
4
More changes. More web sites. As you can see from the links
on the page, I now (then!?) had 5 web sites. Hyperlands
therefore became my portal. The amount of content I had to
on these pages didn't, however increase. So I now had the
content (which mostly incomplete anyway) spread very
thinly. In some cases (geek station), there was no content,
only a front page. A few extra pages got added mainly about
me, which I'm sure no one ever looked at! Under the hood,
the layout was still table based and created by Fireworks,
but with lots more hand coded stuff. Towards the end I did
try reproducing a similar layout using css manually, it
didn't work out well, hence...
Hyperlands
5
This site was the frist template based site I've done. I
used a design called
DarkFusion from Openwebdesign. The template was
great, but the problem was since it was just a an HTML
page, if I wanted to change the menu structure or
re-arange a page, I had to do it manually in each
page. A real pain. Also note that most of the content
on this page hasn't changed in years! A problem which
I hope to put to bed for good with...
Hyperlands 6
The site your looking at now. This to is
template based, but the template is now under computer
control, so I can now (at last!) focus on creating content
for the site. I now use RapidWeaver from RealMac software and I'm using the
magnesium template, one of the 30 high quality
templates that comes with the software.
Hyperlands 7
Well it will happen one day and I’m planing for that day
right now, but at this point I’ve got something 300 blog
posts to covert and I’ve got to come up with some sort of
cool idea for the design. I’m working on it but it’s going
to take a while. Watch this space...