My website's had a bit of a rocky history. I'd always wanted a place for my stories to spread out so I could share the backstory behind each plot, and once I finished AWW, I knew I had to get one. (A Web Woven is just packed with a bunch of stuff I'd planned out but couldn't say in the context, and chock-full of future story ideas.) At the time, the only HTML I was really familiar with was Myspace, so that's where I started.

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While very visually appealing, I ultimately pulled this layout (and Myspace as a hosting site) because of the internal problems with Myspace. In the constant war against phishing going on over there, they had revamped security and the way external linking worked - to the point of reformulating links to have Myspace urls. I had never really been sure about people being able to see my blogs anyway (with privacy, and all that). Myspace is really a social networking site at its core, and its blogging capabilities are infamous in online circles for totally sucky formatting. (I'm talking weird, constantly changing fonts, inconsistent spacing, and unsatisfactory HTML.) I ditched Myspace and moved the party over here to Blogger, where I am now very happily hosted.

As you can see, Blogger was a bit of a switch for me. It used code I was unused to, an entirely different formatting process, and new-styled customization. That's why this layout is lacking in excitement. I was going for a simplistic, elegant look - it kind of backfired into lazy-amateurish, which it totally was. As I began to explore the customizing capabilities and got more comfortable with everything, I started experimenting. Reverting to old style templates helped me a lot - they use less javascript and more of the CSS I learned at Myspace - and I was able to create something much better.

Pink it may be, but this third layout is one I'm particularly proud of. I worked extremely hard on it - with code I still don't understand exactly, but I was able to make fit together. A lot of it had to do with the switch from Beta to Classic, which is a lot more HTML than Javascript. It was cleaner, more advanced-looking, and more real, somehow. It features what is perhaps my favorite painting of all time, "A Cool Retreat" by John William Godward, who is one of my very favorite artists - Pre-Raphaelite is definitely my fave movement.

Relief from that harsh pink! This layout, I think, worked way better. A navigation bar (finally!) up at the top - you won't believe how hard it was for me to get that up there. The color scheme is a definite improvement also; looks more elegant, yes? It's build around another fave Godward painting, "Endymion". Don't you love that rich, relaxed feeling you get from it? And a little categorizing made everything clean and even better.