New website design

A few weeks ago, I brought rockindonkey.com back to the web.  The website has gone through many incarnations from when I originally created it back in 1996 on America Online, with my 5 megabytes of allocated server space.

Initially, it was a fan site for Sammy Hagar, Y&T and Rick Springfield.  Later incarnations saw pages devoted to "Weird Al" Yankovic (which I called "AlNet", a "parody" of the, now defunct, RockNet, using a similar design. -- I got the idea from "Yankovic!" which itself, was a parody of the Yahoo! web portal).

Eventually, I jettisoned the fan pages, and devoted it to my own content.  Nothing much, just a place to host some guitar licks and riffs I had recorded, photos I had taken, and some other personal stuff.

The thing with having a website is, I'm always tweaking the damned thing.  Creating new designs, because I get tired of the last.

So, when I brought it back, the purpose was to give me a place to host this podcast.  Instead of registering "alloverthepodcast.com", I found that rockindonkey.com was available again (It had been used as a Karoake business out of Denver, at one point, and something else, before that -- I don't recall) so I decided that I would reclaim my domain.

So, after reclaiming my domain, I put the old files, which I had backed up from when I still had the site some 8 years ago.

I soon came to the realization that the site needed to be updated pretty badly.  The old content still worked, but it looked 8 years old.

So, I've spent the past couple of weeks replacing the tables with DIVs and CSS, but still maintaining the existing design.  I added a page for the podcast, jettisoned my photo galleries, yet, the site still looked 8 years old.  I really liked that design, but I realized that it really didn't play well with mobile devices.

So, over the past few days I went through the site and totally revamped all of the pages to use a design that would work better with mobile devices.  I came up with something that I'm pretty happy with.  There were some things about the old design that I really liked, and thought looked cute, so I've archived the old version of the site, although it won't be updated with any of the new content.

I'm sure there's a good chance that I might wind up making more changes, perhaps even jettisoning the whole thing and starting over.

But, for the time being, I have a design I'm satisfied with, and I learned a few things in the process, which, theoretically I can apply to work.

If nothing else, I'm back.