Design Elements

Couple of points, all started by a sideways drift into a link from a link. I stumbled upon a page, an actual weblog, still styled as a weblog, and what amused me greatly?

It was still using pre-Y2K (type) html code.

Not that I have anything against clean and simple, no, but this was current content, still being delivered in an archaic fashion.

It worked.

It worked, well, after a fashion.

It worked well, after a fashion.

The first one, punctuation is important.

Design Elements

The first column was under a 100 pixels wide, and that column held a selection of badly-executed buttons with tiny text – titles included – like “Books, Travel, Contact.” While I didn’t see it listed as such, I would’ve expected one button to read, “Manifesto,” as that was a popular way to express “about this site” at one time.

The content column was no more than 500 pixels wide, and there was no header or footer, just raw html spun up with two narrow columns anchored on the left-hand side of the page. Minimal amount of code, still, really old-school.

The actual content ran over 500 words, again, not adhering to current standards of 300–500 words, but then, I was only interested in the content.

Design Elements

While it was a striking article, all it did was fuel traffic to the site, and the site, ultimately, sold that author’s books. That’s all.

I get to toy with web’s styles, as that’s part of my delivery system. I like simple. I’m leaning towards a really basic one column with a sidebar that disappears with a reader clicks down. But that old school look, it was really appealing on some gut level.

Super-simple.

Maybe that’s just Saturn in Sagittarius, stripping away what doesn’t belong.

Another, supplemental piece I’m working on prompted me to dig for the older links. Buried on my site is some extant 1993 code. Been copied, pasted, transferred, uploaded, downloaded, and hosted – on maybe a half-dozen servers. Still, remnants of that first foray are still here.

#html