The Changing Face of Anna Sthetic's Site

Well... I thought I'd do this feature as a special treat (!) for all those of you who didn't see the original site at Geocities and also to detail the changes that have been made since this site started. For a while I was too embarrassed about the old site to show anyone now that the new one is up... but hey, I even got praiseful (is that even a word?) email from people about the old site, so... I figured now it's a lot better (I hope) so it doesn't matter too much about you seeing the old one... ah well, whatever, just have a look and laugh :)

Old site (http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/4075)

Index.html

Main menu/contents (!)

Maggots album

Main lyrics page

What to say about the Geocities site, I wonder? It was my first proper attempt at using HTML so I suppose it wasn't *too* bad (who am I trying to kid?) but I've had to learn a lot since then... For instance, those of you who were there at the beginning might remember my awful rainbow-coloured pulsating WOW logo which appeared at the top of most of the pages and since it was 230kb to load each time... it meant the page always took about 5 minutes to load... Then there was the very simplistic design scheme and my thought that "if you insert a <hr> every now and again it will be fine"... I had only transcribed about 5 songs and the interpretations (where present) were very simplistic, ditto for the navigational structure (structure?) Using too many fonts and strange ones (cf. the "Matisse" font marquee which resolutely failed to display right at all on Netscape), weird hyperlinks and other things were among the many evils of this site :) (Why didn't someone tell me? *cringe*)

Newer site (http://members.tripod.com/plasmatics)

Not quite so embarrassing I hope but as I've been updating recently I thought I would put pictures of the newish site up on here too (just so I give you all a nice taking-ages-to-load page eh!)...

Index.htm

Menu area

As you can see, on the Tripod site I went for a change of colour scheme from the vibrant reds and oranges of the Geocities one, to an icy looking blue/purple/cyan/white/black colour scheme, and I've stuck with that in the most recent version of the site.

Not much to say about this (nothing critical anyway) as there wasn't anything *wrong* with the site this way per se, but I just decided it was time for an update as I'd had this one quite a while. No problems were reported in the navigational structure of the site or loading time etc. (my brief tests with Siteinspector confirmed this) as I made sure to keep all my image sizes small and so on...

I added a lot more pages to the site gradually, I'd be the first to admit that at first there wasn't that much progress on it but over time I added a lot more material. This included lots more lyrics and interpreations (most of the transcription and interpretation work was done during a fortnight-long productive period late last year), the addition of guitar tabs to the site and "interactive" things: feedback, guestbook, etc.

If I have any criticism of the site it would be that the menu area was a little jumbled and hard to follow added to which it does look a little like a shrine (see above)...

I later added a "quicknav" to the shared top border which meant that using a drop down list you can get to most pages in the site, I had a hell of a job getting it to work first of all but now it does :)

New site (still on Tripod)

Same colours etc. as version 2 (when I originally moved to Tripod) but some new layouts, better (IMHO) navigational structure etc.

This is the home page:

Well, that's the one you're in at the moment :) Please take some time to explore this site as it is now and then you can get some first-hand experience of Anna Sthetic's Plasmatics Site Mk III...

I'm working on some new graphics and stuff. Work in progress --

Using Paint Shop Pro to create graphics for the site. (It all looks a bit of a mess, I know. That's just the way I work..hmm.)

Gif Construction Set 32 was used to create some of the animated buttons...

The future of Anna Sthetic's Site

There is a "workshop" section featuring "just done" and "to be done" stuff - sort of my thinking aloud, this shows the things that are "new" and also a task list of things I am planning to update.

served since November 29th