JaceMouse.com Version 4.0
Launched: 11/2004

I feel that this version represents a nice progression of past efforts.  It's generally usable, but aesthetically appealing at the same time.  I had the color scheme in mind for several months, but thought it would have just made the previous design worse.

The white background required some thought.  My photography -- a significant component of my site -- looked very flat.  Especially since my recent photo features have photo-realistic frames and mats applied to them.  The solution was pretty simple -- I just made the background slightly off-white.  It's not such that anyone could actually tell, but it makes a big difference on the photo of the week pages.

This redesign was the simplest yet.  Thanks to my use of cascading style sheets in version 3, this new version came together in about two hours!  Updating the color scheme on all the pages was just a simple matter of changing one file.  You can't beat that!

I haven't yet established a rationale for what I'll feature on the homepage.  For now, I'm just going to use photos that fit the design, and hope to rotate them from time to time.

JaceMouse.com Version 3.x
2/2004 - 10/2004

This design was basically a rebellion against the prior version.  It was austere. But it was useable. 

I originally planned to feature content or photos on the homepage.  But initially decided that usability is more important than aesthetics.  Overtime, I realized that it was going to be hard to makes features conform to the color scheme.

This design is centered around my belief that all my visitors fall into two main categories:
- Faithful visitors, who need dates to find updated content.
- Visitors on a mission, who need good navigation.


A sizable amount of coding went into this version.  This was the first site I built in JSP.  I also needed a way to track dates of updated content.  This required an underlying database that could represent a hierarchical structure of my site -- so changes deep in the site can automatically "roll-up" to change dates at the highest levels.  For tracking blog updates, I also wrote some simple code that can check the timestamps of files on disk.  I implemented JSP taglibs for good measure.  

JaceMouse.com Version 2.x
12/2000 - 11/2003

The first of my sites to employ my newfound knowledge of how color plays into web design.  I used a "2+1+2" concept of color selection -- two complimentary colors, plus one accent color, plus black and white.  The results were somewhat pleasing aesthetically, but I came to realize -- after two years of friends not finding anything -- that the usability was abysmal.  It was a cluttered mess, that distracted everyone.  Oblivious to this point, I thought the answer to any failure to find content was to simply add a teaser for it to the homepage. 

Fortunately, this donned on me mid-way through the process of coming up with a new site design.  Until then, I was headed down the same path.

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• Version 2.1 was the addition of the photo of the week.
• Version 2.2 added the weblog.
• Version 2.3 added the links below the orange box.

JaceMouse.com Version 1.0
10/1999 - 11/2000

This site was launched in 1997.  It gets points for being geeky cool (for it's time), but not much else.  It was a playground to build cool trinkets, more than anything.  The site was replete with scanned in signature (not my actual signature, mind you), animated gif that rotate images of my head, and DHTML drop-down menus that no one ever actually figured out existed.

• Version 1.1 made the menus work for Netscape.
• Version 1.2 implemented full-text searching of the site.