Ten Years

Update 4/5/08: Apparently while I was cheering on my wife, sister-in-law and friends at the BridgeRun, my site went naked a bit early. Thanks to the person who let me know about my preemptive nudity.

Update 4/2/08: Ok folks, show’s over, move along. WHAT? You really want the 90s April Fools version back? Just go back to the homepage and select “1998” from the dropdown on your right.

I couldn’t exactly encourage you all to get experimental last week without doing something a little off the wall myself. If you saw me speak at SXSW or at the Webmaster Jam Session, you’ve probably seen this version of my personal site straight from Geocities in 1998:

Inspired by Cameron Moll’s classic suggestion to steal from my own work, I’ve extracted the late nineties flare from the above design and injected it into my current site. Rather than starting with a clean slate on this site, I thought I’d update (or revert in this case) the CSS alone. Yes that’s right folks, the glorious design you see before you was possible simply by swapping the stylesheet. I was tempted to bring in the good ole’ blink and marquee tags, but that would have violated my self-imposed rule of not touching the existing HTML. I hope you’ll find that the site is still quite functional. You can even swap the stylesheet back to the original default by returning to the homepage and selecting “Contemporary Home” from the dropdown in the sidebar.

For those of you who are suddenly inspired to redesign your own sites - Really now, who isn’t? - I’d like to encourage you to check out my book: “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design”. I’m sure my tips about layout, color, texture, type and imagery will be just the help you need to tweak your own website design into something of this level.

I believe my work here is done. I’m gonna go rummage through the attic now to see if I can find my Garbage Pail Kids stickers, Soap shoes, Hypercolor shirt, pogs, and slap-bracelets. Peace!