chapter 9: blueflower.org v6.0
(january 2003 to march 2003)

This is easily the worst design I ever used for blueflower.org. It's just plain bad. I first posted it on January 4, 2003, and I think I hated it before it was even posted. So, if I hated this one so much and liked the last one so much, why did I change? Boredom. When I changed to version 6.0, I had been unemployed for over seven months. I had a lot of freetime on my hands, so I decided to redesign my website... with disasterous results.

There was a strong trend at the time in weblog design for a rather minimalist aesthetic, and that's what I was trying to go for here. Unfortunately, while I've never really been one for overdesigning (with the exception, perhaps, of version 4.0), minimalism has also never been my strong suit. Minimalist? How was this design minimalist? Man, I suck.

I had grown in love with the use of orange while creating version 5.0, so I decided to keep it around as a contrast to the blue in this version. The results would have been better had my choice of blue not been so damn gaudy.

There was a problem with the layout of this page which I never figured out. The problem was that as one scrolled down the page, the text in the weblog migrated to the left until it was cut off and unreadable. I have no idea what caused it, but it was obnoxious.

No need to adjust your monitor - those really are hearts between the links on the navigation menu. What I was thinking or why I thought those looked good is beyond any sort of logic I could ever conceive. I don't think I was drunk when I made this design, but maybe I was.

The only reason this design lasted as long as it did was because shortly after it went up, I did finally get a job. My first couple weeks on the job I was doing sixty-hour weeks while going through training, and I didn't have a lot of time to devote to redesigning the site. If I did, this site probably wouldn't have lasted a month. First chance I got, this one was gone.

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