A Short History of WTmcgee.com I was over at Jon Hicks’ site and saw he had done an entry on the history of his site. It seemed like a great idea to go thru the old designs of my site and see how it’s evolved over the years. I’m still in the process of learning the fine art of CSS, XHTML, and web design in general, but it’s amazing to see how far I’ve come in the past few years.

Below is a magical journey down memory lane. 2002 – Version 1 of my blog. Before this I had used a blogger site, and my first version was basically a slightly modified Movable Type template. I had a basic knowledge of css (which MT used and still uses for it’s templates), so the site was rather ugly. 2003-2004. Version 2 was the first true version, as it’s the first I made from scratch.

I was going for a distinctive look and feel with the posts and comments looking like ripped paper, but honestly I didn’t have the photoshop skill or the time to make it happen the way I wanted. What resulted was a rather half-hearted attempt at a ‘cool’ web site. I never even got to finish the entire thing, so the sidebars are just sitting in space, with no treatment.

Sadly, it was table based and really ran poorly. It was around this time i learned about web standards via Mr. Zeldman and Eric Meyer’s books. Below was my first attempt at pure CSS/XHTML layout.

Late 2004 brought us version 3 of the site. White it wasn’t too pretty, it was a pure CSS layout, and I was so proud of what I had accomplished. While it was just a few simple floats with a header and a footer, I felt like a web design GOD -) . And that brings us to now (late 2004-now) . I’m to the point where I’m pretty comfortable with web design, this version – we’ll call it version 3.5 – has a lot of improvements over it’s predecessors.

Sure, it’s still the classic “blog” layout, but I’ll get around to giving this place a bit more character on the next major revision. For now, I’m more concerned with hammering out any remaining bugs in the layout and learning more about standards-based layout. It’s amazing how much things have changed over the past few years in the web design world – and how much I’ve learned as well.

It’s an exciting time to be part of this industry, as I feel we’ve only begun to see what we’re capable of with web standards and design in general.