In the beginning ...
Welcome to this site's historical archive. Here you can have a glimpse of what we used to look like. So without further ado, I will show you:
The first version:
Those were simpler times when I was quite literally a web design novice. The site was simple, yet visually striking. Most noticable is the main banner image which I created in Photoshop. The most ironic thing is I have not been able to create an image so visually striking since! Perhaps you can make out the links in the above image, that was the most pages I had for a while, as the next design only really had one hand-coded page.
Web design masters may chuckle (or be horrified, depending) but my first version followed no web standards whatsoever. Sure, it looked fine in Internet Explorer, but it rendered like a dog's dinner in Firefox. Now, I like Firefox almost as much as IE (version 7!), so here comes the next design...
The second version:
Well, this site was actually designed for me by a good friend of mine, Vintahl. I later converted the site to XHMTL 1.0 Transitional, added some ads again, and implemented a new, cool shiny menu from CSS Drive. Now, City In The Clouds gained its most important addition- the blog. The blog to a certain extent eliminated the need to have loads of hand-coded pages as anything I wanted to post about was created on the fly by Wordpress. Also, I had problems with having to edit each page and change the menu if I wanted to add another page.
The third (current) version:
I'll be completly biased here- this is the best version yet. Why? This baby was in semi-private beta testing for a solid month. Therefore when this design went live, it was the most stable yet flexible design yet. This design works in IE7, Firefox 2, and Safari. In fact, all the testing, coding and re-coding was so intensive, I don't think I'll ever re-design the site on this scale again! I had a few pages live, but then I hit another snag...
The same problem that plagued me in version 2 presented itself to me again- the menu. I needed to seperate the menu from the webpages. I knew it was possible, but had no idea how to do it. I came across a solution that uses PHP. So now, all my HTML files are PHP files, and this has been the latest change to the site. Now when I upload a new page to this site, I just need to change the menu file.
Well, that's the end of a brief history of City In The Clouds. We've come a long way and we're going to go further still.
