Design History
The Beginning
I began making web pages when I was in 7th grade. My first page was an inline, centered monster with random things that I thought were cool—including a few animated GIFs. My design was all <font> tags and tables and framesets. Like all other beginners I was soon fascinated with JavaScripts and embedded Java Applets. I had one page set aside for JavaScript, complete with little ants that followed your cursor and two or three games built in to the same page. I even had cool MIDI files embedded into the main page of my site.
My friends and I got our first free hosting on Angelfire and compared pages endlessly. But we were all content to have lame pages with no content and a million animated GIFs over a tiled background image. None of us even thought about accessiblity, portability, compatibility or any of the other codewords indicative of good design.
Gestation
The interminable grind of time ground on, and I found myself no longer in a 7th or 8th grade classroom full of guys with lame sites. I was in high school, and nobody really cared. There was a period of down time when I simply enjoyed the web for what it was and didn't try to contribute in any way. I played the Two Towers MUD, did C++ programming for classes, and had a good time. My angelfire site went through a painful, half-baked redesign where I tried my hand at DHTML with JavaScript to poor results. I barely knew what <div> or <span> tags were, and used them along with my table-based design. I had the beginnings of a <head> based CSS stylesheet but didn't know how to include external sheets. The site was a nightmare. Something had to change. I focused on school, kept using the coolest new websites (Google), and programmed for my computer.
The Awakening
Then one day it happened. I realized what CSS actually was! I found the CSS Zen Garden—a place of peace, reflection, and accessiblity. At the same time, I began work on the Texas A&M University Residence Hall Association website (which has since changed) and tried my hand at programming web applications with ASP and VBscript. It was then that I realized how dynamic content worked, and I found a need for unified, centralized styles at long last.
With a newfound love for simplicity in design, I registered clarkmoody.com and began work on a standards-based design from the ground up. This was Summer 2005. I didn't have any content, but I decided to try to sell my services as a web designer.
You may view the Old Version of the site if you want to see where we've been.
August 2008
