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Hello! Thank you for visiting my first 'real' web project!
I've cleaned it up a bit to lessen the 'embarrassment factor' and remove some broken features, but left enough to showcase a snapshot of my early 2000s web design.
It’s been an awesome journey seeing how far web design has come since then.
What once seemed 'cutting edge' now serves as a nostalgic reminder of my learning process.
You can explore my current work at www.soultempestcreations.com. I’d love to share my latest projects with you! ~ Danielle
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|About Me & My Layouts|
Here is some info about my current and past layouts. Click on a thumbnail to see the whole picture.
The site's original Banner (1998)
This banner was part of my first attempt at making a website. The background was clouds, and had animated gifs all over. As I learned more HTML, I made the layout better, but it still sucked. The page was like 1 mile long, and hardly any of the pages were finished. Gradually I put up more content, and the site started to get a bunch of hits. I liked programming so much, I decided to get serious about the page, and the tentative title:'Dannycat's Mysterious Mind' stuck. Today I accidentally erased the second banner that replaced this one on this first layout. Whoops. It was done in Photoshop, unlike the one above, which was done in MS Paint, like alot of my older art, and had a wooden sign look to it, with chrome edging and rivets, complete with the 'woodburned' Dannycat stick kitty, and water spots. Stick kitty (her revised look on the layout below) became DMM's new mascot. Eventually I scrapped the tacky cloud bg, and made the layout below.
The first full makeover (2002)
This was the first organized layout. Right before I made this particular layout, I had put tables on my site, to keep the gifs, descriptions, and links formatted. But there were a million tables, one for each link. So I made this newer layout with just two tables. One for the links, all organized pretty, and one for the news and updates. I love Dragons, obviously, and featured them as the highlight of the layout. My site originally had a self-forwarding splash page, which made all my friends (and probably tons others) want to kill me. I nuked the splash for a simple mouseover one, which everyone loved. By this time, I was getting tons of hits to the site. I added tons more content, and a lot of interactive things which visitors find intriguing. My friend placed my links and banners throughout his site, gaining me more hits. His site is popular, and helped mine out a lot. A little while later, I was told that I should convert the site to XHTML. I kept procrastinating, knowing fully well that most regular HTML tags were deprecated, and XHTML was quickly becoming the new standard. Me, having had taught myself all of the HTML that I know, was oblivious when it came to reading FAQs about the new code. I got a book, HTML for the World Wide Web, 5th edition, with XHTML and CSS, by Elizabeth Castro, it's amazing. I found out that I wasn't as oblivious to the new code as I thought. So this leads me to...
The site's first XHTML Layout (2002)
Phoenix Fire. The mother of all my layouts, and the one I'm most proud of. The WHOLE layout was drawn and colored by me, drawn freehand with pencil, inked with a thin sharpie, scanned in, and edited in Photoshop. It was originally going to be based off the tv series Sagwa the Chinese Siamese cat, but my mind was changed to, and set on this Phoenix layout after I saw the newer Harry Potter movie- The Chamber of Secrets. How did that inspire this layout? Easy. I love Phoenixes, and there was one in the movie, Fawkes. Phoenixes are amazing creatures, and I wanted to catch the mystery and beauty of them on my site. I saw a blue Phoenix in Monster Rancher 2 for Playstation, and fell in love with him. Blue fire is so exotic. The green one was just a test; I used my favorite shades of green, and he turned out terrific. I'm quite partial to this layout, so I don't know when you will see a new one. But rest assured, this new code with CSS makes updates a snap- just by changing a few things, so you will see new layouts.
LAST UPDATE circa 2003- Well, the current theme is the last one that was and will be created for this site. I won't attach a pic, for obvious reasons. I had changed the site name to something more mature that fit my personality better. I also reused this name on one of my blogs. Site updates were in progress here, but then I ended up getting hosting elsewhere and a domain (sadly that host shut down, so there is nothing left of that one), so all work here stopped and was left abandoned until now, 2025, where I am now just cleaning up old code here and there and posting links to my
current site. This site will be left as is once I am done straightening up for 'historic nostalgia' of my web design journey. Thanks for visiting, I hope to see you on my current site!
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