... and that person's name is Nick Storr.

Nick is a amazing singer/songwriter/musical jack-of-all-trades from Tasmania that I've had the pleasure of knowning for a few years now on various internet forums.  In January Nick posted about his first attempt at a personal website that he created using the PageKit templates from Elated.  I surfed over expecting to see something nice, as it's fairly easy to make a passable site nowadays with all the free tools available.  I was dead wrong.

Nick had, in the space of a few days, created a site that put all of my various designs over the past four years to complete and utter shame.  It was unpretentious, easy to navigate, and most of all professional.  Needless to say, I felt humbled and embarrassed at my abortion of a PageBuilder site. (Note - I'm simply discussing the visual and design aspects of my site.  Content-wise, I was and still am extremely proud of what I have)  Within two minutes I decided to redesign my site from the ground up using the same resources as well as various "professional" programs I had "acquired" over the last few years but never had a chance to delve into.

Over the next few weeks I studied up on both the various PageKit's that Elated had to offer as well as the options the FrontPage gave me.  I made my choice, backed up my old site and started to work on the new design... and after two more weeks abandoned it.  The vast amount of JavaScript programming and photo editing needed for what I had chosen was far out of my still meager skills.  You could say I set my "sites" too high.  You could also say I have a knack for terrible puns, but that's an argument for another day.

Returning to the drawing board, I took measure of what my abilities were and went with the template you now see.  Due to it's pure HTML-base I can modify it with very little effort, and after a few days of selecting a color scheme and a few design changes it was only a matter of pasting my data into the new format... which is tedious and mind numbing, but not mentally difficult.

I also took the opportunity to make some changes in the structure of the site.  The vast majority of content has been carried over from the old design, but I've arraigned the sections in a much more logical fashion.  For instance, you can now find all of the information pertaining to music under the music header as opposed to being spread out among four separate pages on the old site.  I've also designed a submenu system on the right of each section that will lead to each individual page.  This will make things easier for you the reader to navigate the site, as well as for me to update and make changes much more easily.

So check things out, and feel free to drop me an e-mail with your likes/dislikes, broken links, spelling errors (much lessened with FrontPage's spellchecker), and general thoughts.  As always, this area will be used for a general overview of what's going on in my life.

...which isn't covered at all in this message.  Give me a break, I've been designing a whole new site!  Give me a few days on an update.

~Ian, 4/4/03