Site and Layout History
This site has been through a lot of different phases. I will not bother anyone with a very long description of everything it has known, but you can find a summary here.
AKA Juliet Clark
Back when I owned a Titanic fansite made with tables and using colored scrollbars, I had a personal site known as AKA Juliet Clark, although I didn't use the acronym tag back then. It was, to be nice, "en vogue". More sincerely, it was a crappy reproduction of all the trendy personal sites you could find out there — and can still find: celebrity iframe layouts, ABCs, surveys, and all this other fun content.
As every self-respecting first personal site, AKA was located on a crap free server: Geocities. Very little bandwidth, not much space, no PHP, advertisements, page builders, everything a good webmaster could dream of — and wake up screaming afterward.
But it did not remain in this poor stage, rusting into the darkest regions of the underworld wide web. It was discovered by a webmistress known as Jenna, owner of the deceased domain among-the-stars.com. It remained pretty much the same, with the same damn generic content as every site out there.
Immortal Dreams
In February 2003, yes I've been on the web for such a damn long time, I have decided it was time for a change. I restarted my personal site from scratch, making it a bit more personal, but still keeping it a bit trendy. Trendy as in "it was released with a layout featuring Rachael Leigh Cook PSDs on a 3D background".
Immortal Dreams remained for a very long time. It went down and back up. It went on a few domains (where I was a hostee, not the owner) that pretty much all got hacked one day or another. Then finally I let it die. No more Immortal Dreams.
How could I live without a personal website? I found Funpic and loved it, above all that I had learned PHP some time in between those changes. I moved Immortal Dreams there. This all took place back when Funpic didn't have any advertisements at all.
No Fluff No Pink
I was tired of Immortal Dreams as a name. I just wanted a name change, and I thought that I could go for something a little merrier. I chose No Fluff No Pink.
Layout Number 1
The first layout was very orange. It was made using butterfly brushes from Kenekila.net (this website has closed since then). It relied on percentages to control the width of the different areas. I however did something I think didn't fit: so as to put the content first in screen readers, I moved one of the two sidebars to the right. It was a correct thing to do in the markup, but I should have left it on the left side of the content area in the CSS.
Layout Number 2
The second layout featured my sister's cat, Richard Parker, who is now unfortunately dead. It was one of my now overused one-column layouts. It was neat and simple, mostly in shades of gray and green, with some orange to recall the cat's color.
In The End
I was beginning to think that No Fluff No Pink was a rather silly name. So, of course, I changed it. I chose "In The End" because I thought it reflected my state of mind at the time: in spite of everything that happened to me, I am still there.
In The End Layout
This is the only layout In The End ever had, in its short life. It had a main bizarre-gray background, with a white content and navigation area. It was the return of the sidebar, mostly because I finally decided to use Wordpress. It had a small purple touch to it, coming from the shirt in the picture. The picture, of course, is one of myself.
Unruly Julie
Unruly Julie is a nickname that was given to me by one of my friends, Nick. I decided to adopt it as a site name for two reasons: first, it reflects me, as I am indeed unruly; second, it has my name in it (SEO FTW!).
Coming up with a layout was a real pain in the butt. At first, I had a cute and very pink layout with a small image of a flower on top (a photograph I took). Navigation was similar to the one I finally used. There was no sidebar and the content area was very large. I decided to drop it in the end because I didn't like having only such a small image on top and the rest being blank. I had tried putting the navigation on the right, but I still didn't like the result.
I then tried various color schemes using a generator, and trying not to use any images. I never ended up liking it.
I also tried patterned backgrounds, but it still failed.
I finally managed to make a layout I didn't change after two days...and I have decided to keep it up! It however, of course, isn't perfect at all...
- Since I'm using a photograph as a header, the content and sidebar must have fixed widths, something I would prefer to avoid.
- The site is too blue (once the header image is out of sight), but adding more green makes it look too...strange.
- The navigation doesn't please me.
- The text on the header image ("Unruly Julie") doesn't please me either.