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sitely

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My experience with websites goes as far back as 2001, with my first taste of HTML on the dreadful neopets.com. I suppose I didn't really start web designing until about 2002. I first started off on brinkster.com, with a personal site called "twinkle candy". Mind you, I was still in my pre-teen era (not a very good age, if you ask me), and personal sites with bubblegum pop designs was the "in" thing at the time, along with these really bizarre site names. Most of my layouts were created by hand, pixel by pixel. In fact, I was very much into the pixel business. Vectored shapes were a neat thing too, except they took up a lot of time, skill, and energy that I seemed to be lacking in. Still, I tried.

As the high point of free-sever sites began to decline, I finally bought a domain around the begining of January 2004. At that time, my design style had changed; I was no longer into the cute-character phase with generic content. Instead, my love of RPGs resurfaced, and the discovery of character shrines gave me a new forward. Like I've said before, personal sites can be fun, but I would eventually run out of things to say about myself. Instead of using rigid pixels and characters with solid, defined lines, my layouts now had much more fluidity in them-- they felt softer and blended. To this day, the very basis of my layout technique has not changed. Every once in a while I would come up with vectors/cell-shading, but with a busy time schedule, I'm not sure if I'm quite up for it now.

My first character shrine was to Sakaki Haruto from the anime series Witch Hunter Robin, which at the time was hardly a shrine at all. I guess my first shrine to a video game character was to Sora of Kingdom Hearts. The first wave of the Kingdom Hearts boom was starting to slowly die upon its creation, with the sequel in high anticipation. It was the product of a conclusion that took me months to come upon, long after the peak of the game's popularity. The second came Antihero, a shrine that was built around August of 2004. Although my name is inextricably linked to this shrine and particular character, it was by far the hardest shrine to build. The site's nexus is based largely around my personal connection to the character, and because of that it made it all the more difficult. To sound a bit more comprehensible, it's easier to give your soild opinnion on a character from sheer intellect rather than pouring it from your soul. There definitely came more shrines after that, but I'll save their stories for another day.

The layout structures of all my layouts have also changed; I first started out with the transparent iframes, which gradually grew more miniscule with time. Now, I try to use divs and think bigger-- but I can only think so big! I have also kept up some form of blog since, which is where I've gained experience in using divs. My first real blog resided in diaryland, and now I've relocated to livejournal. As a general note, I try to stay away from tables if I can because I suck at tables, No, really.

There should be more to this, but the rest is history. I'll probably edit this sometime in the future.

Sites, designs, and content © Stefi 2002-2007. Artwork and characters featured belongs to their respective owners; no infingement intended. Reproduction without express permission is prohibited.