|
Tutorials
For Your Site
Other Junk
|
The very first website we had (above) was a template (pre-made) by Frontpage (the program used to create the site), thus it was unoriginal and drab. It was updated and edited on Mia's Dad's computer, which was not always available to use. On the home page, as you can see, there was a photo of Mia's cats, Thomas and Fluffy. The only other page it contained was one long "Neopets" guide. And when we say long we mean LOOOOOOOOOONG. Then, sadly, there was a period of time when the site was of no interest to us. And so it was isolated. This dreary saga lasted about 6 months. Finally, we decided that the site deserved another chance to live on the WWW. But the site was going to need some alterations. By then, Mia had her own computer (YAY!), which did not contain Frontpage. Mia's Dad, a former computer programmer, (which means he's an EXPERT) attempted to install Frontpage onto her computer. It unfortunately did not work. This created a depression and there was no website. This lasted 4 months, during which we brainstormed numerous ideas, such as what the website name should be. RCN, our provider, gave us the URL: users.rcn.com/lastname, which did not project popularity. We came up with ideas like loserville.com, and mswebmasters.com, and others. Surprisingly, grafikgorilla.com was not on the list. Eventually, we decided to try installing Frontpage again. This time it worked! And victory was ours. This time we wanted to have a website formatted by us, from scratch, which gave room to all our ideas. It took us a while to work up to the point we at are now, though. We started simple with a plain, white background (sorry no picture) and plain text links (no snazzy navigation bar). The idea of a town had arose on our list (yes we made folders and lists). We made one town which contained all our links. From this, we developed more links, that were also more complex. Soon more towns and a better background seemed to be a good idea. That was around where we were in July, 2006, but there was one thing missing to the seemingly complete website... WE NEEDED A URL/WEBSITE NAME/CATCHY PHRASE so people could recognize the site, and the LOW popularity could rise. The idea came about of calling it laughingpig.com, the name of the diner in "city 2" (which is no more). Although, that didn't seem to explain our theme. We liked the idea of using an animal in the URL though. So we thought about how the website was focused on graphics, and came up with, almost randomly, the name: grafikgorilla.com. This stuck, and the wrong spelling suited the casual feel of the site, and our personalities! (Plus, we liked the alliteration). Once we had our new URL, we started to question the "cool-ness" of our site. The towns seemed too childish and we felt as if we were copying other sites such as Neopets. We started to contemplate the idea of a renovation. That was around September of 2006. The next step was to figure out what changes we were going to make to the site. We began by thinking about small changes, but soon we realized that we needed to look at the bigger picture. We explored all different websites whose look we especially admired. Thus, we started to recognize that there were two main problems in our site: 1- our layout was confusing and unprofessional. And 2- Our website had no "main" point; it was too RaNdOm! (Don't get us wrong, randomness rocks, put people, we had a page solely on CHEESE!) Now that we knew what was wrong with the site, we needed to fix it. We decided right away that to fix the randomness we could make the site GRAPHICS oriented only. It took more time and exploration to fix our other problem, layout ugliness. We drew rough sketches and made lists of ideas we had (check out the tour to see the sketches in all their authenticity). Once we had a real grasp on our concept, we put our old site to rest (RIP). We saved it in an isolated folder 3 days before the new year (2007). In February of 2008, we made a few more renovations including a new sidebar and a new-and-improved blog about things that were happening in our lives (and our local food stores!) With the help of Mia's dad (the computer dude), we learned how to turn the picture in our heads (and on paper) into website reality. It had a complete makeover, including a new, cleaner-cut layout. Then, true to our ongoing pattern of abandonment, our site wasn't touched again for quite a while (6 months). When we went back to it, we had to make some slight re-evaluations. We liked the basic layout of our site, but there were some things that just didn't interest us quite as much anymore. After some thinking and list-making we decided to make some changes. The biggest change of all was that now our site was focused on TUTORIALS instead of graphics. We edited the already made tutorials and wrote some completely new ones that we'd been wanting to write for a while. We were done... Well, almost... Please ENJOY!!! If you would like to take a tour of the old site that we've been talking about, click here! |
