I just spent 5 flipping hours redoing the Phantom 20/20 site... AGAIN.

Backstory: NeonDragonArt.com used to be several, very seperate sites. Being the vain little creature that I am, I wanted to make sure that people knew that they were all interconnected and done by the same person. A lot of visitors thought it was a collective of 2-4 artists. Lo, I combined the site into one unholy whole and the world knew just how insane and overworked I truly was! Vanity goal accomplished.

Combining all the sites into one resulted in the same color scheme and dual menus on every page. In addition to the frames that gave users a VERY TINY area to view the content, the whole thing was a success and a failure all in one. Combining all the sites into one really unified the collective and made it easy to skip from one site to another... but until you learned the system, it was all kinda confusing. If you viewed the site on anything below 1024x768, god help you. The content was all restricted to a frame that became insanely tiny on lower resolutions, so you'd have to scroll 2 or even 4 times to see a piece of artwork or a comic page.

It also made it difficult to link to neondragonart.com. If you are a comic site, chances are high that you want to link directly to a comic so that your visitors don't click the link and think you've hooked up with some unrelated site. "This isn't what was on the banner!" It also became difficult to refrence specific pages. If I wanted to point someone directly to a picture, I'd lose my menu system or have to direct them through the menus. "click the entrance image, the dragon shadows, then 2004, then choose the thumbnail near the bottom tha's kinda blue". THAT JUST DOESN"T WORK!!!

I've decided to go back to seperate sites that are well linked to the rest of the collective on the main page. It keeps the site a whole, while allowing users to scroll freely, enjoy different layouts and color scheme for each area, refrence specific strips, pages, and commentary, and have the ease of a single menu per "site".





That's the back story. Bleh.

I've undertaken converting the smallest area of NeonDragonArt.com, Phantom 20/20. After another failed layout (which used the frames that don't work so well on lower resolutions.) and a pair of feet that wouldn't stay attached to the menu, I decided to start over. The new layout is now fully functional and in theory, works on all browsers at all resolutions.

I redid the site once and then realized that my menu was too long across for 800x600 users. *jessica reformats 100 html pages* I then realized that I had a gap where the background wouldn't line up. *jessica reformats 100 html pages* I then realized that my e-mail dragon linked to contact.html instead of contact.php. *jessica finds the "replace all" button in dreamweaver and reformats 100 html pages in under 20 seconds* *jessica feels stupid for not having found it sooner*

The new layout features:
A shout box: Holy Yevon! I'm gonna regret putting that sucker in there later. People seem fond of "hello?" and complaining in them.
An easy link if you want to hook up with Phantom 20/20: http://www.neondragonart.com/ptt/
An e-mail contact form; the e-mail spam bots won't see my address anymore! I won't have to consider a penis enlargement every 15 minutes!
An easily scrollable page. You can now read an entire strip at one view.
One menu (if you're a dummy, you can probably surf the areas of the site that used to confuse you.)


And, that's about it. It seems like much to-do about nothing, but that really was a lot of work. Now I just need to get off my butt and tackle the other areas of NeonDragonArt. I plan on doing Dragon Paint Tutorials next. After that I shall reconquer TimeScapes, and after that I will recombine Dragon Shadows and NDA Jazz into a single, purple unit. Last shall be NeonDragonArt.com itself and the NeonDragonArt.com store. The collective and the store will probably retain the grey-blue-orange color scheme I currently have going.

Did I mention that took very long?

(and yeah, there's going to be people who don't like it.) Ah well...