When I first learned HTML, I was in middle school and expage was about the coolest thing ever. I, essentially, taught myself how to create websites on pages like expage, geocities, and homestead. These sites gave you blank slates and long sub-domain names (e.g. http://expage.com/pagenamehere) and a few basic tags to start with. I absolutely loved being able to create a page from scratch, constantly looking up new code or emailing other people that were designing pages to ask them how this did something on their site. I delighted in creating an entire website where every page was different then the next and I had to go into the code I’d written every time I wanted to add new content. For years this entertained a select few of my friends and I to created several webpages and competing with each other as to who could make the more popular website.

Once I eventually got sick of all the ads on the free sites, I would scour the web asking people hosting their sites if I could be a “hostee” — often, you had to fill out a little form which would ask you questions like what the secret word or phrase was to determine whether or not you had read the rules they outlined. And, of course, once I eventually started earning my own money, I eventually sprung for my own domain and hosting.

Recently, the popularity of static HTML pages has waned and now the much easier CMS has taken over. In fact, the only sites I usually see that are still completely HTML based are websites by artists who clearly just took a web design class and were employing what they had learned. And speaking of web design classes, I recently took a web design class and had the full nerdiness of my HTML knowledge confirmed. Along with the advent of CMS, free pages now almost exclusively only allow their users to use templates: they don’t touch the HTML and the sites are fully automated.

Since I’ve switched to CMS, I see the vast differences: you don’t touch the code, aside from tweaking the pre-made themes (which you need to learn at least a little php to do); content is much easier and, thus, there is much more content; and the changes are pretty instant. I don’t know enough about CMS (particularly wordpress, which is what I use) to create my own themes yet, but I have enough knowledge of HTML to tweak these themes successfully.

Despite the ease of use and my efforts in slowly learning to design themes, I always feel there’s something missing on my website without the raw HTML pages. And that, after my long rant, is where the new design and reworking of my website was inspired by! While I did not create the theme for this blog, I did hand create most of the rest of tinyturk.com…

The Camera Diagram Menu is an idea that has long been in the works as I wanted to create a way for all the pages on the entire site to successfully link together so people wouldnt get lost. I also had my eye on an image of a camera diagram that microsoft had in encarta. So I did some research on other camera diagrams, and drew many versions of the camera as the menu (the lens was the hardest part) and labeled each mechanism with the pages on the site instead of the actual camera parts.

The About Section utilizes a horizontal layout, which is something I’ve been wanting to play with for a while (my entrepreneur class that I took this semester helped with the content).

The Portolio is my absolute favorite part of the site and took forever to do because, as was appropriate for the new design, I had to hand-make each and every thumbnail, sample different backgrounds and determine the readability of the text, type in each image name and definition, as well as spend a lot of time on dictionary.com looking up definitions of the categories that I felt best described the work I wanted to include. That being said, I did NOT design the flash gallery (simpleviewer) since I know next to nothing about flash! The background images in the portfolio are almost all images from crappy point and shoot cameras, once again tying into the “back to basics” idea, as well as my personal belief that the camera and gear doesn’t make the photographer.

And on the Blog I included the menu at the bottom — floating it did NOT work as well as it did on the other pages, and ultimately it distracted too much from the other content — as well as a few other basic tweaks here and there.

And that’s the story behind the new website design! I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it!