When Love Brooklyn Libraries, Inc. had to slash their budget, I helped them get rid of a ridiculous service that charged $200 a month for this:
Yes, it’s WordPress. For $200 a month, the nonprofit had this site hosted on the service provider’s servers. Included in the cost was a Facebook page and a limited number of updates. Granted, it’s really not very expensive compared to hiring a WordPress developer to build it and continue updating it. But with this subscription service, both the website and the Facebook page were filled with stock photos, and the site was rarely updated. Not very enticing.
For the price of a tax-deduction, I had the domain pointed to my Dreamhost server and built this, also in WordPress:
The Howard Johnson’s color scheme had to go. Well, it had red not orange, but it was still ugly.
In 2009 Adobe CS4 was relevant software with some of the best desktop publishing tools available, back when “desktop publishing” referred primarily to creating printed documents from a laptop or desktop computer and HTML4 was sexy markup. With the suite came Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks – shiny software originally by Macromedia. Adobe soon would integrate functions within Flash and Fireworks into their own Photoshop application, though integration was not entirely successful; Flash’s animation ability would later become the focus of Edge Animate.
Back then Dreamweaver was less than perfect. It had a graphical user interface that allowed users to drag and drop elements onto a page while the program created the markup in the background. The markup was sloppy, containing complicated-looking classes and IDs that made simple text changes to the HTML document a visual nightmare. I tended to stay away from the GUI and create websites from the text console, making use of Dreamweaver’s preview and tag-closing functions. One of those websites is still alive at kiai.us.
Note the black background; looks sleek and saves energy. 😀
As of today’s date (October 8, 2017) many of the links don’t work. At some point, the site had been migrated and its secondary pages got lost. (There must be a backup somewhere…)
The fun side to this website is that it was built in HTML4. The pink page links were created in Fireworks, which automated the production of mouseOver, onClick, and mouseOut images. The GIFs are encased in a table, Internet Explorer–friendly. The comments at the top and music player at the bottom are linked to Revernation.com and require a Flash plug-in to operate. One of these days, I’ll replace the comment widget with something on my own server, maybe javascript-based.
For simple websites, I still like typing out HTML. It’s a little like knitting: meditative but still requiring thought and planning. Though it’s hard to keep up with developments in styles and tags, at least W3.org does a good job and keeping its content updated. I’m thanking Adobe for giving us Brackets to help out. And Dreamweaver has been greatly improved since CS4. I still rely on console windows.
