NetSquirrel.com Redesign: What Was Changed And How

Well, as you can probably tell, NetSquirrel.com now has a new look and feel. Instead of designing the site's look and feel myself [no time] or hiring someone to do it for me [no money], I broke down and bought a Dreamweaver template from Project Seven. The content is stil all mine, but the layout is all Project Seven's.

I spent a weekend in July 2005 tweaking Project Seven's template a bit in Dreamweaver—converting the template pages to XHTML 1.0 transitional, changing the color scheme, creating my own banner graphics [in Fireworks], and adding a few extra navbar links [which are really nothing more than <p>s with some cool CSS applied to them.] All in all, since I know Dreamweaver and Fireworks pretty well [thanks to Lynda.com], it was a pretty simple process.

The hard part—or at least the time-consuming part—was cutting and pasting all of my site's old content into the new template pages.

Template: Project Seven CSS Transitions [US$89.95]
Color Scheme: SimplePrimaries
Squirrel image: Soque River Watershed Association
http://www.soque.org/Photo_Album/Best%20Squirrel%20Shot.JPG

Previous designs:

January 1998 - December 1998: A bunch of really big, ugly GIF boxes. Thankfully, this design has permanently disappeared from the net.
December 1998 - April 1999: YELLOW! No, really. YELLOW! And not a cool yellow, either. More of a 1970's Century 21 yellow.
April 1999 - August 2000: Fun with nested tables. Lots and lots of netsed tables.
August 2000 - December 2003: More nested tables, but only this time with a purple banner.
December 2003 - July 2005: My first stab at CSS positioning.