My pattern of a new website every year started in 1997 and ended in 2002 with Daydream Reality. Though it did have sections for projects that had been in previous incarnations of my website, this one was more like a blog than anything else.
I'm not sure how much it helped or hurt to have this as an outlet, but its use encompassed my brother's death, the start and end of an influential relationship, and the start of college. In addition to always having had a connection to dreams, the website title had a tie to that relationship in that she was my daydream, now a reality. So when that ended I, like a crazy person, kept changing the theme and title of the site, using titles like "Dream No More" and finally settling on "Real or Dream?".
In terms of the actual construction of the site, I used Frontpage after I'd grown tired of pure HTML in Notepad. That meant hosting on Tripod, the one free host I could find with Frontpage extensions. It started out using a Frontpage theme named Zero, though I later changed it to a theme I designed in a graphic arts class in high school. There was a short time near the end when I moved it to a subdomain of my brother's memorial site, changed it to the Frontpage Evergreen theme, and made a PHP/MySQL dynamic blog, rather than the static text pages I used for so long.
In late 2005 as the site entered the limbo of disuse, I put up a spinning image of Megaman as a placeholder and never came back to it.
I'm not sure how much it helped or hurt to have this as an outlet, but its use encompassed my brother's death, the start and end of an influential relationship, and the start of college. In addition to always having had a connection to dreams, the website title had a tie to that relationship in that she was my daydream, now a reality. So when that ended I, like a crazy person, kept changing the theme and title of the site, using titles like "Dream No More" and finally settling on "Real or Dream?".
In terms of the actual construction of the site, I used Frontpage after I'd grown tired of pure HTML in Notepad. That meant hosting on Tripod, the one free host I could find with Frontpage extensions. It started out using a Frontpage theme named Zero, though I later changed it to a theme I designed in a graphic arts class in high school. There was a short time near the end when I moved it to a subdomain of my brother's memorial site, changed it to the Frontpage Evergreen theme, and made a PHP/MySQL dynamic blog, rather than the static text pages I used for so long.
In late 2005 as the site entered the limbo of disuse, I put up a spinning image of Megaman as a placeholder and never came back to it.
Screenshots
The original Zero theme
The alternate theme I designed
Evergreen theme
Megaman placeholder after I stopped using the site