Waaaay back in 1998 when I first started composing music, I decided to create a website where I could share my midi music. This precursor wasn't even called Draggor's Den, it was actually "Rob's Page o' Stuff", and was hosted by Geocities. I didn't know any HTML at all back then, so the site was created using Netscape Composer. It had the very typical linear design of amateur webpages, along with ripped off graphics including a green-grass background.

I decided to soup it up a bit, adding some original backgrounds made with Reptile. Still fairly linear design, mostly concerned with my music. This design was the first to include the collection of Final Fantasy 7 midis from NeoPhoenix. Finally I coined the title "Draggor's Den", and I started including some of my artwork. This was mainly my specially-drawn pictures of Draggor. At this time, my site was hosted exclusively on Tripod.

This was a big time of design transition. Along with the new name "Draggor's Den", I also experimented with frames in my design, using a wood background and some image flipping for category names across the topbar. I also had a wide sidebar with obsolete links in it. This is where I expanded my page's scope into Writing as well, though I've never had the time to type up most of the things that I wanted to put in that section.

This was my first real step towards better webpage design. This page was the first to use frames effectively, and had the category list in a topbar along with the page counter and an embedded random midi chooser. This was my first real experience with image flipping and mouseover events. Each page was contained inside a dark-blue central area that faded into the black background. Unfortunately, this page had so many original graphics that it became an annoyance to browse due to load time. At this time, I got the great opportunity to have my site hosted by Newreris.com, where I could have unlimmited space to post MP3s of my music, as well as many other large files, such as artwork etc.

While I was in Spain over the summer holidays of 2000, my idea for a new high-tech look was born. Because I was away from computers and the internet, I sketched it down on a piece of paper and busily worked on it as soon as I got back home to Canada. The graphics were all, once again, created by myself. The backgrounds and framesets were specially designed to remain continuous no matter how high a person had their screen resolution set. This is when the idea of all-green came into play, as a means of immitating the 'raw digital feel' that one gets when working with primitive workstations such as the old and ever-popular Apple IIe's. ;) But alas, once again I overdid it with the images - the mouseover buttons were animated, making loading extremely slow.

The squareness and monotony of white frames on green began to drive even ME crazy! I wanted to create something more ergonomic, shiny and metallic. Although this version didn't turn out exactly as I had intended it, it's still a giant step up from version 4! Over the semester break I read a book on HTML cover to cover, learning all the standard HTML tags and modifiers, and getting a better understanding how to ensure an HTML document looks good on all types of browsers by NOT relying on formatting tricks. The resulting code was effective and easy to read and modify, allowing me to concentrate more on finising my site this time instead of wrestling with the jungle of HTML tags as in previous versions.

Here are some useful things I learned:

• NEVER rely on formatting tricks, EVER. They'll come back and bite you in the ass later.
• The best HTML editor in the world is WordPad.
• Ordered, Unordered, and Definition Lists are a godsend!
• Placing descriptions of images in their ALT modifiers lets people with text-only browsers see what's going on.
• Images are great, but should be used sparingly. The Version 5 design cut the size of the Images folder from Draggor's Den 4 in half!
• Invisible tables are great for formatting, but should be used sparingly.
• You do NOT need more than one HTML document to implement a complex frameset. This was a real *DOH* for me.
• There exists a <NOFRAMES> tag that can be used to display a special message for users with browsers that do not support frames.

I scrapped the black and green appearance - even I found that green text on the green and black background was EXTREMELY unpleasant to read.

Also, I was encountering a lot of issues with the <BR CLEAR> tag which is apparently not supported by IE. When you have aligned images or tables, the tag is supposed to jump the text clear of them. But for some reason Microsoft decided to ignore the HTML standard (or just plain forgot about supporting this tag), and some of my pages looked like a dogs breakfast in IE. Naturally I couldn't settle for that. But I used both IE and Netscape when designing this new layout, and I'm satisfied with the way it looks in both browsers.

Also a big factor in this new design is the use of Stylesheets. With this, I can change the general appearance of every page on my site by editing a single file! This will become invaluable once I start to get bored with my site's appearance. And also I'll be able to make themes for special occasions like Christmas and Haloween! What fun! :)

Finally, I eliminated frames altogether. Version 5 had the option of full, partial, and no-frames. This just added a lot of unnecessary complication, and I'm fairly sure most people just used the no-frames version. But I didn't originally design the site to be easily navigable without the frames. So though it was still possible, it still became a hassle. So for Version 6 I made the navigation bar which appears at the top of every page.

Now this one was starting to look really good. It had a nice layout and such, and it saved me a lot of work because most of the lists of songs were automatically generated. But load time for lower bandwidth users was absolutely atrocious! The excessive and unnecessary navigation graphics took a great deal of time to load, nevermind all the Javascript include files. For this reason I created a reduced graphics version, but still the pages had to be dynamically generated on the Client's computer. In other words, if a user didn't have javascript enabled, good luck doing anything.

Still this site was a step in the right direction. As the webmaster, in most cases I only had to deal with the necessary data, rather than filling the data in around template tables in HTML. Of course, when I got offered the more powerful alternative of ASP pages, I couldn't bypass the opportunity...

What I learned:

• Javascript is very useful, however one should be careful not to fully rely on it. If you can get away without using it, then avoid it altogether.
• Navigation graphics are great, but they can sometimes be a hinderance. They can use up too much real-estate (very bad for users with 640x480 screen resolution) and along the same line, they can force your webpage to take up a certain ammount of space, not properly adapting to the size of the browser window. It may take a little bit of doing, but it's always worthwhile to make your design scaleable.

This is where we're at right now. Draggor's Den V8 uses Active Server Page (ASP) technology to dynamically generate the HTML that is sent to your browser. How is this different from the stuff that was generated by Javascrip in Version 7? ASP is processed on the server, which takes the burdain of additional processing off the client computer. Newreris unfortunately didn't support ASP, so I had to move over to the MFM Communications server owned by my friend Steve.

Another neat feature is Database access. The data from all of my songs and artwork are stored in a Microsoft Access database, and the ASP pages can retrieve, sort, and filter the appropriate data, and use it to generate the big lists of song or artwork. Makes my job a hell of a lot easier!

There are a few things that I'm still not entirely satisfied with. I started programming the website before I actually read the book on ASP programming, and I'm missing out on a lot of features that I could have used. I do plan to go back sometime and revise some of the ASP code, however I'm not gonna make a new site version just because of it. More likely it'll be nicer for me, as things can be a bit more automated.