Planetary Bugle

The first version of the new Planetary Bugle online magazine is now online. This is designed for the simple purchase of celebrating, and advertizing, the writers and work at the Avengers 2000 and DC Heroes sites.

This is a little different from previous sites as it works around an inline frame that was designed around the cover image. Currently the site is coded in straight HTML but I will be reworking it, and tweaking it a little, in ASP shortly.

Mezzomint

More of a web page than a website, this is simply a page that provides contatc information for subscribing to the Mezzomint zine. The logo was designed based on the one used on the printed zine.

Centering the information both vertically and horizontally is the biggest "new" techinique I used on this page. It's something that is going to find its way into more of my designs in the future.

DC Heroes

This website is home to the stories of the DC Heroes Fanfiction group. It is the sister site to the Avengers 2000 site and shares many of the same goals with regards to design. The site also owes much of its design style to a previous incarnation of the actual DC Comics website.

The simple, clean lines and colors seem to becoming my modus operandi for website design. Again, the behind the scenes admin pages relieve much of the burden of updating the site so stories can be released as they are received which was a another large goal.

Avengers 2000

Avengers 2000 is the home to fanfiction based on Marvel Comic Groups Avengers and other related characters. Over the years it has expanded to multiple Imprints that are based on different divergent points from the official Marvel continuum. The website has gone through the hands of several webmasters and designs before reaching the current version.

The driving factors behind the design of this site were:

• Make the stories housed there as easily accessible as possible, especially the new releases;
• Design the site to easily expand to add new Imprints and Branches;
• Provide a mechanism to showcase upcoming storylines;
• and finally, to provide a way for multiple people, without an understanding of HTML to be able to update the site.

The design accomplished the objectives, however, I did not count on the number of Imprints increasing as it has. Therefore, it is possible that the site will need some changes in the not too distant future.

This was also one of my first designs to move away from the dark colors and use a lighter, brighter color scheme.

Omega Writers Group

The website for the Omega Writers Group came about after I stumbled upon the previous version of a website for the group that had not been updated in an age. Having thoroughly enjoyed the excellent, original stories set in a shared universe, I offered to design a website to host and showcase them. Needless to say the offer was accepted and this is the result.

What's different about this site? Well, the biggest things tested out here are the use of a graphic along with an image map for the navigation, and a much heavier use of javascript. The javascript found its way into the design of the Avengers 2000 site.

While many of the stories have now been loaded to the site there are still almost 100 that still have to be added. I usually release 4 - 6 issues each week, so the entire site should be complete before the end of 2003.

Frontier v1.0

Status: Retired (8/31/2002)

Frontier Publishing was the efforts of a group of fanfic writers who wanted to create a site for original fiction. As one of the group I offered to design and run the website. Version one represents the original design for Frontier and the first attempt I made at a more complicated design, namely header, three columns and footer. The design was done using multiple tables, with some being nested inside each other. The obvious drawback of this was the need for all the tables to be filled before any data was displayed.

Due to differences I made the decisions to move away from Frontier, and as with all the Retired websites, only the front page is active.

Note: The original design attempted to use a splash page as the initial page which was to contain short quotes from reveiws of the titles. However, when it became apparant that many people were bypassing it and going to the main page, the splash was removed.

Frontier v2.0

Status: Retired (8/31/2002)

At the time of my resignation from Frontier Publishing I was actively working on a new design for the site. The goals of the new version were two fold:

1. Remove the tables to speed up the load time;
2. Ensure that the layout was standardized across the entire site.

As such this was my first design to make extensive use of CSS and the positioning available through it. While the site never saw actual publication, it has proven to be the basis for several design that I have done since them, with the DC Heroes site being a major user of the techniques first tried here.

Note: As with all the Retired sites, only the front page is active.