Hey everyone! This is SKAPASTA (or FunkyDealer to all the OGs reading).
After being stuck at my desk for almost a full year, forced to slave away with no reprieve, version 2.0 of my website is finally completed! ...or at the very least not missing any crucial, core pages.
Do you like it? Does it look good? It BETTER, 'cuz I'm not about to spend another 7 months doing fuck all, and then another 2 actually coding. But, in any case, as wasteful as those 7 months sound, it wasn't all spent putting webdev off by playing games I'm not even good at for many a hour, even if it did make up a majority of that time period, because in between there were not one, but TWO scrapped iterations of version 2.0. And because this brand spankin' new update is live now, I thought it'd be fun, or even possibly mildly entertaining to show what I had off, since I wasn't really planning on acknowledging 'em anymore anyway.
Proto 1 (that's what I'll be calling the first iteration) actually got a pretty good ways along before I decided to trash it, with the home, art, music, about, and landing pages all completed.
Like version 1, the website's theme was primarily based on WarioWare: Twisted, using bright, saturated colors, checkerboards, rounded borders, etc. Unlike version 1 however, instead of visiting pages seperate from one another, the navbar on the left would change the iframe's source, on the right. With it, the color and backgound of the parent page would also change to match whatever page the iframe was targetting. It's honestly one of the parts I miss most about this version.
Proto 1 wasn't too bad as a successor to version 1 (Hell, anything hand-coded is a good successor to me when you first started out using the sadgrl template.), but ultimately, it had to go because:
1. I included sound effects for hovering and clicking in this version, but the rate at which the sounds would play if you glided your cursor over all the nav buttons at even a moderate speed caused the site to slow down a LOT, and
2. I kept finding myself running out of room whenever filling out a page. 1080x685 seemed like a good size initially, but things would always get way too cramped way too quickly ...but perhaps that's on me for making everything so large and bloated.
Now, Proto 2 on the other hand, did not get nearly as far. The only progress that was made towards it were completed home and art pages, and an incomplete music page. While it still mainly kept the WarioWare: Twisted theming, ANTONBLAST had already been out for a little bit, and as what probably isn't a shock to anyone, I played through it all on release day and kept playing more the following days, which naturally caused a slimy, vaguely Anton-shaped bioform to crawl out of my headphones, and into my brain, where it then laid its spawn, allowing me to never know peace since. Which is to say I became obsessed with the game, and made it part of the theming.
Maintaining many of the characteristics of the two previous versions, Proto 2 sported hard, sharp corners, slightly crooked edges, and big stylish logo-ish text for headers.
It was certainly a very strong design, but like Proto 1, the layout itself is what eventually lead it to its demise. I couldn't tell you why, but it had a very crude and shoddily-made look that quickly made me unhappy. Maybe it has something to do with how everything is disconnected from one another?
This now brings us to our (as of writing) current look. As was probably immediately apparent, Version 2 has much less that WarioWare DNA in its blood, all due to the fact that both the design and layout are based HEAVILY off Nintendo's own website circa 2001. There was some consideration of injecting some ANTONBLAST into it, like Proto 2, but I decided against doing so, as not to ruin how perfectly sorted all the page contents were. That said, only the homepage copies most of Nintendo's homework, and for a lot of the other pages here, I just had to wing it in terms of the content layouts. Don't worry, this page is the worst of it.
There's not much I can say about all this when you can just go and look at everything yourself, but one important thing I learned is that having the random Warios be something fun tucked off to the side is a way better decision than having 'em be a "main attraction."