|About Me & My Layouts|
Here is some info about my current and past layouts. Click on a thumbnail to see the whole picture.
The site's original Banner (1998)
This banner was part of my first attempt at making a website. The background was clouds, and had animated gifs all over. As I learned more HTML, I made the layout better, but it still sucked. The page was like 1 mile long, and hardly any of the pages were finished. Gradually I put up more content, and the site started to get a bunch of hits. I liked programming so much, I decided to get serious about the page, and the tenative title:'Dannycat's Mysterious Mind' stuck. Today I accidentally erased the second banner that replaced this one on this first layout. Whoops. It was done in Photoshop, unlike the one above, which was done in MS Paint, like alot of my older art, and had a wooden sign look to it, with chrome edging and rivets, complete with the 'woodburned' Dannycat stick kitty, and water spots. Stick kitty (her revised look on the layout below) became DMM's new mascot. Eventually I scrapped the tacky cloud bg, and made the layout below.
The first full makeover (2002)
This was the first organized layout. Right before I made this particular layout, I had put tables on my site, to keep the gifs, descriptions, and links formatted. But there were a million tables, one for each link. So I made this newer layout with just two tables. One for the links, all organized pretty, and one for the news and updates. I love Dragons, obviously, and featured them as the highlight of the layout, adding my Suicune alter ego, and a few other Anime characters to the news table. My site originally had a self-forwarding splash page, which made all my friends (and probably tons others) want to kill me. I nuked the splash for a simple mouseover one, featuring Suicune and the such listed above, which everyone loved. By this time, I was getting tons of hits to the site. I added tons more content, and alot of interactive things which visitors find intriguing. My friend John, who is webmaster of The Westfield Network, placed my links and banners throughout his site, dragging more hits to the site. His site is amazingly popular, and helped mine out alot. A little while later, John was telling me that I should convert the site to XHTML. I kept procrastinating, knowing fully well that most regular HTML tags were deprecated, and XHTML was quickly becoming the new standard. Me, having had taught myself all of the HTML that I know, was oblivious when it came to reading FAQs about the new code. My friend Crystal, webmistress of Dragon Anime, hosted by the Westfield Network, had bought a book on XHTML that John had recommended on his site, and also was mentioned in. The book, HTML for the World Wide Web, 5th edition, with XHTML and CSS, by Elizabeth Castro, is amazing. I found out that I wasn't as oblivious to the new code as I thought. This wasn't a surprise to John, or Crystal, who already have the new code up. So this leads me to...
The site's first XHTML Layout (2002)
Phoenix Fire. The mother of all my layouts, and the one I'm most proud of. The WHOLE layout was drawn and colored by me, drawn freehand with pencil, inked with a thin sharpie, scanned in, and edited in Photoshop. It was origionally going to be based of the tv series Sagwa the Chinese Siamese cat, but my mind was changed to, and set on this Phoenix layout after Marc and I saw the newer Harry Potter movie- The Chamber of Secrets. How did that inspire this layout? Easy. Marc and I love Phoenixes, and there was one in the movie, Fawkes, who made us both very excited! Phoenixes are amazing creatures, and I wanted to catch the mystery and beauty of them on my site. Ok, now I know your next question- why blue and green? Well they are colors listed in my favorite color category on my website profile. I saw a blue Phoenix in Monster Rancher 2 for Playstation, and fell in love with him. Blue fire is so exotic. The green one was just a test, Marc's favorite color is green, and he loves green fire, so I figured I would see how he looked green. I used my favorite shades of green, and he turned out terrific. So I guess the blue one is me, and the green one is Marc ^_^ . I'm quite partial to this layout, so I don't know when you will see a new one. But rest assured, this new code with CSS makes updates a snap- just by changing a few things, so you will see new layouts.
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