Destructo Project Version 7

I started work on version 7 in October 2005. A month had scarcely passed and i had just finished the Autumn theme for version 6 and here I was already working on version 7. I had an idea and I didn't want to sit on it for too long.

Version 7 was a design I've wanted to do for some time. I tried a couple of times in the past, but never had the skill to pull it off. Grunge is kind of hard to pull off when it comes to web design, because it is very graphic heavy. You have to choose between a great looking graphical site with slow load times or a generic looking site with fast load times. The more you use graphics, the more unique your site will look. You can also use less graphics and repeat them over and over, but the site looks generic. I feel I landed some where in the middle.

I worked in Photoshop for about a month and a half tweaking the look and feel of the design. I sliced it all up and put it in the tables and uploaded the design to my server. I was greeted with the slowest design I've ever made. I went back and worked with graphics, tried some repeating tiles and here and there and uploaded it again. I cut the load time down by a quarter and I didn't like how the design looked. To generic. I decided it was time to loose the tables and go with a CSS design. This was a big step for me, since I had never designed a table less web site before. After a month of trial and error, I had the basic design all worked out. I had a few graphics vs. speed issues to work out, but it was ready by the end of January. The load times went down by almost three quarters, much better.

I chose the celtic-irish-shamrock look because it was better than a valentines day design. Actually, I thought it would look good combined with the grunge look, so I went for it. For the fist time in five years, I dropped the rotating header images. I didn't feel they fit in with this design. I like the menu bar on this design. I spent alot of time working with different ideas for menu button until I settled on the highlighting shamrocks.

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