SeanMcb.com

My personal website has a long history of redesigns. I enjoy designing webpages and hacking CSS, so given that I have no other projects to work on, I will return to my own website. This ends up happening on a fairly regular basis (every 2-6 months, generally). I think this is a result of two factors: 1) I continually learn new things, and I want to incorporate them into my own site as a reflection of my current knowledge, and 2) my satisfaction with a given design seems to decrease as a function of time, no matter what the original layout. I just always feel like I could do better.

Well, you asked for it, and now you’ve got it. On this page, I will maintain a running history of my website’s design evolution (from oldest to most recent). Let’s look back, shall we?

Sean’s World / Lawn - The Early Years

Dates Active: 1996 - 1999
Tools Used: Notepad, free online clipart

Sadly, I don’t have any screenshots of my earliest personal webpages. They were single page affairs made with blink tags, animated gifs, really the whole shebang. Pretty ghastly by today’s standards. At first I called my site “Sean’s World” and used a repeating background of clouds. Then, I decided that this was too unoriginal and changed it to “Sean’s Lawn”, using a repeating background of blades of grass. I honestly don’t remember what kind of content I put on the site at this early stage.

McTech Ind. - Original

Dates Active: July 2002 - July 2003
Tools Used: Photoshop, FrontPage(?)

My very first design under the name “McTech Industries”. I created the name in high school as a brand to slap on my computer programming class projects, but I ended up liking it, so I kept it for my first “real” website. I did the graphic design in Photoshop (I’m sure you can tell from the cheesy use of the stained glass filter) and built the HTML by hand in … Frontpage? Honestly, I’m ashamed to say that I used Frontpage now, but sadly I think it’s true. This layout was done in *GASP* frames! So, in terms of modern web standards, it was a mess, but it wasn’t bad for a high-schooler in 2002. I really had fun making this and keeping it updated.

McTech Ind. - Collage

Dates Active: July 2003 - October 2003
Tools Used: Photoshop, FrontPage(?)

I made this design as a much-needed update to the original during the summer after my senior year of high school. Layed out in tables and composed entirely of static HTML, it wasn’t much of a technical wonder. I painstakingly updated the history by hand each update, which is why I can go back and reconstruct this history now.

McTech Ind. - Autumn

Dates Active: Octover 2003 - June 2004
Tools Used: Photoshop, Dreamweaver

This is a slightly revamped version of my collage theme which is slightly less distracting with garish colors. This layout was layout out with tables and was mostly static HTML (with a few PHP pieces for galleries and such).

McTech Ind. - V4

Dates Active: June 2004 - December 2004
Tools Used: Photoshop, Dreamweaver

This is the last design that I did under my old domain name of McTechInd.com. I was just starting to experiment with using CSS for rollovers, but I was still using tables for most of the layout. This site was pieced together with random PHP backends that I had written at various times for the various sections. It also used some static HTML.

SeanMcb.com - Original

Dates Active: December 2004 - August 2005
Tools Used: Fireworks, Dreamweaver

This is the original design for my new domain name, SeanMcb.com. I did the layout and a new hand-coded PHP backend over winter break of my sophomore year. It was a good learning experience building a backend from scratch, but silly considering how many perfectly good open-source CMSs already exist. This design didn’t degrade very well at all in non-CSS browsers, but it was my first personal site done without using tables for layout.

SeanMcb.com - Radius

Dates Active: Never (designed in February 2005)
Tools Used: Fireworks, Dreamweaver

This design was a response to comments by some people that my winter break redesign looked too much like a “snowboarding company website”. After thinking about it, I had to agree with them. Besides the fact that it was too busy and had an obnoxious site menu, the site did have “that feel” to it. Since I don’t snowboard, I decided that I should change it. However, redesigning my site in the middle of the semester was a bad idea. I couldn’t work on it in large chunks, and when I finally did get a large portion of it done, it didn’t really have the feel that I was looking for. I wanted a “slick” layout, and this was definitely more … amateurish? I’m not sure. Design aborted.

SeanMcb.com - Radio Tower

Dates Active: Never (designed in May 2005)
Tools Used: Photoshop, Dreamweaver

This design was my first attempt at building a Wordpress template. The industrial-looking elements of the design are from a photo that I took of a radio/cellphone tower near my house in Montana. The dot patterns are a braille font, and they actually spell out sentences (I’ll let you figure them out). I actually still like this design pretty well. However, most other people that I talked to felt that the tower elements and dots made the layout too busy. In addition, at this point I was still trying to bend Wordpress to my existing site architecture (not using the blog as the central element) and it wasn’t very easy at all. After some frustrations at not getting things to work the way I wanted, I decided to ditch the whole shebang. This is the second design in a row that never saw the light of day.

SeanMcb.com - Brown Squares

Dates Active: August 2005 - November 2005
Tools Used: Fireworks, Dreamweaver

I created this layout during the summer. I was also building web layouts and applications during the day, so this one came together rather slowly. This is the first (actually implemented) redesign of my site with Wordpress as the backend. I spent lots of time importing all of my old posts from my old hand-coded backend as well as my brief experience with Xanga. I really liked this design when I first put it up, but the more I looked at it, the more I realized that I still hadn’t reached my goal of “really slick”. The most difficult thing about making this design was getting the repeating background to line up properly with the centered page elements. Lots of math and CSS mojo.