Once in a blue moon I have the urge to go back and look at the old web sites I designed in the past. I no longer design sites these days, but back in the mid to late '90s, and the very early '00s, I spent quite a bit of time doing so. Over the weekend I came across my re-design for Jagman's "Jaguar Front Page News" website. Since I'm pretty much a regular here these days, I thought this would be an appropriate place to write about my experience with this. Hopefully it's at least a mildly interesting read!

Anyway, going all the way back to my beginnings, in about 8th grade or so I learned HTML through a friend. Together we joined together and made our own crappy little site based around one or two specific gaming topics. We loaded the pages with way too many grainy images that took forever for people to load on 28k modems, and god did they look terrible. Regardless, the internet and HTML in general was new and unique to us back then (circa '95 or '96).

Over time, I went my own way and hosted a variety of web sites on free platforms such as Tripod, GeoCities, etc. Each site was improved over the last, getting better in looks and design as time moved on. None of my sites ever garnered more than a hit or two a week, but I had a passion for just doing it, and I got some sort of enjoyment out of it. And as I continued, I became much more efficient and creative with linking many small images together to create the overall form and shape of the site. First it was with frames, giving the site a boxed-in kind of look with a border on all sides, and then later it was embracing tables and coming up with smooth but unique designs from there.

I like to think my crowning achievement was my re-design of JFPN. This was around '99/'00 when my collection was at its peak (50+ gaming systems), and back then, one of my most beloved systems was the Jaguar (I do admit I was a bit of a fanboy then). I had frequented Jaguar Interactive (one of the primary Jaguar messageboards out there) about as much as I frequent AtariAge these days, and through that I noticed one thing in the Jaguar community: Of all of the websites available, none of them really did the platform any justice. Of course, they had some good information, but none had a "professional" look or feel in any sense. I really felt at the time that the platform deserved a much better face on the internet (Remember that in the late '90s, the Jaguar was very much looked down upon, something that has since seemed to have cleared up greatly).

Mike (Jagman) ran Jaguar Front Page news, and at the time we had both been chatting on a regular basis. I would say we were pretty good friends, as far as online buddies go. One of the most enjoyable things to do was rock people in TetriNet, and we had many, many great times with that. Most-likely after some random heated game, I pitched him the idea of me re-designing his "Jaguar Front Page News" site, with the idea stated in the last paragraph in mind. His site seemed popular enough (In reality, I don't know if it was even popular at all), there was a lot of good info that could use a facelift, and best of all, he had it hosted on ClassicGaming.com. I think he was a fan of the sites I had made prior, and he liked the idea of me redesigning the JFPN site. We came to the agreement that I would design a new JFPN and bring over all of the old information from the old design..

So, before I go into the details of the process in making it, please take a look at the completed site below. I cannot show you the prior product before my re-design, but the end result of my efforts came to this, below (Please click the image to expand it to its proper size):

The process itself of creating the re-design was a very, very drawn-out process, despite how simple it looks. For starters, back then, I strictly used Notepad to do all of my HTML, which is a drawn-out process in itself. Sure, it's not C++, but damn does it still take a good chunk of time. Second, I had to start the design from scratch and didn't have any ideas of what I wanted to do asides from using a simple table design (I knew I wanted something like the big-name gaming sites of the day, but that was about it). Third, I was still in high school. I had constant homework, I had a job, and I still wanted to game--a lot. The other problem was also that I had the habit of taking on web projects that were much too large in scope for one person to handle, and this would cause me to become unmotivated and go on hiatus more often than I should have. One hiatus I think lasted four or more months--it was really crazy.

The total project lasted nearly two years, I believe. I think I started it in early '00 (January-ish), and I didn't finish it until my first semester of college, uploaded and unveiled around November/December '01. The entire process hit some hitches due to some of the prior points noted, but there were some massive hurdles, completely unexpected, that really got in the way:

First off, I initially designed the site to function primarily in Netscape (my personal preferred browser of the day). The problem with this is that at the end of the project, I found that nothing viewed properly in Internet Explorer, and I had to re-create the site all over again. Second, I found an error in one of the menu options (displayed on every page), and again had to go through every single page (120+ html files) and edit out the mistake. I believe this happened even once more, and I had to go through re-editing every single page a third time. Ugh.. total nightmare.

The beauty about web design these days is that programs can do much of the work for you, cutting back development time. Want to edit the navigation bars on every page? Simple--Just have each page call for a specific source file to display, then simply edit the main source when you need to make a change. No more editing hundreds of pages when you find an error or need to make a change! This is something I wish I had learned how to do (and had the foresight to understand) prior to making this site.

Onto happier things, I think the site fits the Jaguar theme, with the red, black and gray color scheme. The title image was especially fun to create, and the units you see in the image are from my actual collection of the time. Underneath the title bar is where the ClassicGaming ads went, and I personally liked coming up with the futuristic-esque images to the left and right of that space. All in all, I think I accomplished what I was going for in my head. What do you think?..

The only downfall is that the site is no longer updated, and has since been taken offline due to inactivity. Jagman has the source, so we'll see if it gets re-uploaded in the future.. As it stands now, the last update was in 2002, as you can see in the image.

Anyways, if you happened to make it to this point, you are probably saying to yourself, "That was a completely pointless read!". Regardless, thank you for taking the time to read this. I am personally just glad that I was able to document this on an Atari site...

PS:

For the kids out there that maybe have thought about learning web design, I went ahead and split the image into sections, outlining the layout of the table. I also made a few extra "designer notes" () giving you an idea of how I slapped things together. Don't listen to me entirely, because some of my techniques weren't the best to be utilized, but they got the job done.