History
I initially started fooling with websites before 2003. I was probably 11–12 when I got a little more serious with it. Here’s the story of my website, which eventually turned into this, from the beginning.
Pre–2003
I experimented with a lot of things, downloading other websites and editing them into something I liked. I always used lots of effects, snowflakes, trailing cursors, flashing buttons. It was all real fun. I got into Neopet pages for a while, before setting up my first “home-page.” It was, probably, the most useless website on the planet. It had a black background, a secret message (in black text, too, of course), with a title of “Mission Impossible Kids.” I kept that for a while.
2003 & Beyond
My original homepage.
I set up a real website. It looked something like the image above, but with a rad Java animation of the site’s name, Brianz’s Fun Page, using a custom font and cool colors. The background was blue with stars; things I can't recover. The website also featured a Guestbook, Groupboard, Custom Commit Cursor, standard Java breakout game, and a custom Javacript art gallery, coded by my brother.
Later on, a friend and I created a website together, thus I lost my first good attempt. That laid dormant for a long period of time, and it’ still a work in process.
2007
Near the end of 2006, I decided to start blogging, with a blog that soon came to be know as Sakana. (Sakana means fish in Japanese.) For much of the time I made lots of random fish designs for the blog. (But, I've lost most of them, what little I still have is broken, though I'll try to fix it soon for archival reasons; I like going over my old work.) Soon I wanted more than a simple blog, so I came to this experimental design:
My first design for my new website.
Detail.
My design for the website featured an index, an about page, a new home for my blog, a (web)comic section, for which I would make weekly comics, an art section, for a gallery of my artwork, and a links section, to function almost as personal bookmarks, as well as site search, bread crumb trails, a removable sidebar setup, lots of rounded corners, a faded header, and plans to expand the site even more.
Quickly, I realized I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
2008
Throughout 2007 I continued blogging. I decided I’d need something simple, and – without a CMS – easy to update. By the fall of 2007, I came up with this:
Second idea for my website.
I really had a liking of thin designs. I have no idea why; perhaps because I had a relatively small ammount of content, and that was my way of squishing it together.
The main idea of this design was to completely remove standard site navigation. The theory was to simplify and make the website easier to update. Though, I found out that a single-page website is harder than it sounds for portfolio.
My third idea.
I made a third version, still with a single page. Though, I tried to make it seem like more, and I used some odd CSS to achieve it. I planned to separate the design into multiple pages for convenience... However:
The released version.
I became intrigued by the idea of making my website look like the text of a book. I used a line-length of approximately 66 characters, and tried to make the markup, and design, as simple as possible. I again opted out of standard navigation, in favor of a back button.
This fourth design, the original released version, is currently available in its most recently updated variation for viewing. Some minor changes have been made over its time, however the original is essentially all there.
The current version
Designed in (very) late 2008 – early 2009, nothing has been changed without good reason. Most changes were made to further branding, or for better readability and sense.
Thanks for the interest!