SEB is looking a little more like SEB today. Ever since I made the move to WordPress I’ve been at a loss to come up with a site design that I’m happy with. The WP templating system is a nightmare compared to blogging platforms I’ve used in the past and I’ve never really mastered it. Not that I’ve ever been particularly great at HTML coding to begin with, but I am fond of the few layouts I managed to cobble together in the past.

This is just a slightly modified Twenty Eleven theme from the base WP install, but it makes it feel a little more like it did back when I was still coding the layout by hand. I was going to make another attempt at it, but then I remembered that the one image editing package I know how to use — PhotoImpact — and the one HTML editor I know how to use — Homesite — have both been bought out by bigger companies and discontinued. PI by Corel and Homesite by Macromedia which was in turn bought out by Adobe. If this sounds familiar it’s because I bitched about this previously around about this time last year. Showing that I’m becoming predictable and consistent in my habits as I get older.

Of course I can’t just write a short blurb about this cyclical need to redesign SEB that comes around each fall without hitting up the Internet Archive to see what past layouts I’ve used. To get to the earliest stuff I had to use my Jenkins Online domain as we didn’t get the Stupid Evil Bastard domain name until October of 2002. Considering how long I had SEB with a black background it was surprising to realize one of the first layouts I ever did was for a white page:

The very first layout I could find in the Internet Archive. Click to embiggen.

Here we can see that I got started with the narcissistic practice of putting my face on the page very early on in SEB’s history. My choice of font size and link color are horrendous as it makes reading the page annoying as fuck. I kept it like this for several months until someone I knew at my job at Ford told me he designed webpages as a side job and offered to do one for me if I put a link back to his own site on the page. A chance to have a pro design a layout? How could I refuse!

One of the few SEB layouts that I didn’t design myself until we made the switch to WordPress. It was… interesting. Click to embiggen.

The Internet Archive misaligns a couple of the images in their reproduction, but that’s more or less how it looked at the time. I wasn’t overly thrilled with it myself, but I felt an obligation to use it for at least a little while. From about September of 2002 until January 2003 after we moved to our current domain name and I came up with this fabulously retro template:

I wasn’t even alive in the 1950’s so I have no idea why I thought this was cool. Click to embiggen.

I loved this template for a couple of reasons. The first being that it contains a couple of simple graphical tricks that I had recently mastered such as the gradient fill in the title bar that gave a pseudo-3D look. The hint of a drop shadow that runs down the left side of the text boxes was something I was very proud of at the time. Also, the move towards blue in my templates. OK, this was more of a turquoise color, but it’s blue-ish. Blue has always been my favorite color (probably because my eyes are blue) and it would end up being a big part of future layouts. That lasted up until sometime between August and October of 2003 when I unleashed the layout that would last for years to come:

Yes, I can see you and you should be ashamed of yourself. Click to embiggen.

This is my favorite layout of all the ones I’ve ever managed to cobble together. My 36 year-old self would stare out at you with that slightly self-satisfied smirk on his face for at least the next 3 years. There were a few tweaks along the way, but no major changes until sometime late in November of 2006. For some reason the Internet Archive had trouble grabbing the stylesheets for scans it did near the end of that year, but by January 2007 the layout added the all important MENU BAR:

The SEB you know and love now with smaller Glowering Face of Doom and a menu bar! Click to embiggen.

It’s still the same basic layout, but my head isn’t as massive (or as bald) and it’s a little easier to get around to some of the extra stuff we had on the site and barely made use of because I’m ADD and there were video games to play. The IA didn’t scan SEB much during 2008 and it lost the stylesheet for a lot of the entries in 2009, but it’s clear this was the basic layout until at least November of 2009 when we made the switch to WordPress and my days as a template designer came to a screeching halt. There were a couple of other minor themes I did that never got picked up by the Internet Archive, but these were the major ones.

There was a brief period in December 2009 when I had a custom template I’d cobbled together that kinda sorta looked like the previous layout prior to the switch to WP, but it never worked 100% and looked crappy in comparison and I swapped it out for an overly complicated to customize WP template I found. Since then we’ve cycled through various templates none of which I’ve been completely happy with. The stuff that looks halfway decent is often missing some features of another theme that looks like crap but does what I want.

This current theme is far from my glory days as a mangler of HTML, but it at least has the right font in the header and, for the most part, the right color scheme. Maybe I’ll get ambitious and start looking through open source HTML editors again and see if I can take another crack at designing my very own WP template.

Yeah, and maybe monkeys will fly outta my butt too.