Although this domain has existed for many years, the content on it has varied a lot over the past years. It is first at time of writing, April 2009, that I finally got myself to get this site running with a decent theme, content management system, and content structure.
So what got me to do some serious work? School did. Our Design teacher decided to give us the task of working on a website design, and I decided to take it a step further by making it into an actual website.
Anyway, long story short, our teacher has some documents she wants written to hand in by Tuesday the 21st April, so I will write that up here, so she can come here and take a peek.
1. Figure out what you want to convey with the site. What will it contain?
Since this is a website oriented around myself, I only wish for it to have the things I require. These include:
Front Page.
A home page is essential. This gives the user a global look of what this page is, and where to go from there. Mine has content that give a short overview of the different pages that exist on the site.
About Me page.
People who do not know a lot about me should go here, to find out who I actually am.
Blog section.
This is an essential part of my page, since this is one of the main reasons for having the site. I travel a lot, and I want to be able to make blog entries to keep the family and friends up to date on what is going on in my life. In October 2009 I am going to Japan for three weeks, and for an entire year from summer 2010. By making this site properly, I will be able to utilize this site for those purposes.
Gallery.
The gallery is where I will upload all the images that I find interesting to upload. Pictures from my various trips will be sorted into categorized galleries, so it will be simple to find the important things.
2. Who is the target audience?
The target audience is mainly family and friends, and as you will notice when browsing, there is also potential for other audiences, like possible employers, co-workers, and any interested person who does not even know me to come to the site and jump into my life. It may not be very likely for this to happen, but the potential is there.
I chose my family and friends as the audience, for they are the ones I wish to keep in contact with - even when I (or they) are not around.
3. Creation of the site.
I started creating this page the very day that we got the task given. I
quickly decided that I would get this page running using a Content
Management System, CMS for short, that could help me manage and edit
content on the fly. A CMS can allow one to not need to edit any code
when simply writing new content for the site.
After looking around for a while, I opted to use Drupal, an Open Source
CMS, which has a high level of expandability. Using an advanced and
large system has the pros that the site can be expanded and developed
dynamically over any amount of time, but the large con that it takes
quite a while to set up and get used to.
Once I had the basic structure of the sites content outlined, I started
looking into what sort of design I wanted to use. I took a free and
open source codebase from the Drupal theme pool, and used that as base.
The code behind a site is what holds the images and text in place, and
formats the text correctly. Imagine a site as a mosaic of images and
text, and the code as the pins that hang it all up on a wall to make
one unified page. By having a codebase to edit, I would not have to
write all of the code from scratch. The fact that the code was Open
Source meant that I could legally rewrite the code.
Now that the barebone structure was set up, I started looking at design ideas.
My first idea was a brightly coloured page with paint-like splatters in the background. I worked on it for many hours, and even got it exported to an almost-working site design before dropping it. 
The design simply looked way too bright for my taste after looking at it for hours on end, and I therefore completely dropped it.
Next I moved on to a design based upon a picture of my eye, and tried to make a multi-tone fade on the iamge with many weird ideas added on. The result was a horrible failure, which I am only documenting here to show that I have used more than one try at making this site.
I am sure you understand my reasons for dropping this design. As I dropped it, I decided that it was time to go back to drawing something from scratch, something completely new. I had for a short while considered making a photo-based design on which I would add elements in photoshop, and as I was arranging things on my desk for a layout like that, I decided that the quality would be substancially higher if everything was drawn in Photoshop.
So that's what I did.
I spent many a tedious hours in Photoshop drawing up this desk-looking layout, and almost got completely satisfied.
At that point, I sliced up the images, and started getting the CSS and PHP script codes from the theme to work with this layout.It was a long process, but when it was done, I found myself with the design I have now - one which I am quite proud of.
After the site design was complete, came all the content writing. As of writing, I have yet to complete my About page, and I am not certain it will be finished in time for hand-in time - I expect my teacher will overlook that little blunder considering the work I have completed on this page.
So yes, that is it. The telling of how this page came to be!
