Home      Art Gallery      Good vs. Medieval      Interactive      About / Contact

The History of Vigistry.com

Until 1996, I simply called what I did "Vigue Artistry," but a college classmate melded the two words together, and thus "Vigistry" was born. Three years later, after amassing a substantial portfolio, I built a home in Cyberspace. Here's a little stroll through time to show how Vigistry.com has evolved over the years.

January 1999: I registered my first Internet account with Mint.net and put my novice web design skills to work. Strangely enough, my debut site had little to do with art. Rather, I dedicated it to Good vs. Medieval. This site had buttons shaped like opening books, and it promoted my first literary experience, What Goes Around. Along with basic text and graphics, this site was loaded with Easter Eggs. Visitors were challenged to solve a mystery, and by searching for clues throughout the site could they find the secret ending page. One person actually contacted me saying she used the code to find it. Cheater! A small art gallery was added a few months later.

November 1999: At this time, the art gallery became the focus of the site, and my comic babes took over the shift. This was an experimental phase with lots of code being played with. On load, the home page graphic changed randomly to show the colors and face of either Bluette, Celest, or Centura. This was accompanied by a random selection of midi music playing in the background. Note to anyone who wants to design a site: music is rude! The buttons were oval shaped, multicolored and gaudy. For kicks, I added a makeshift guestbook in which I received the entries and uploaded them myself. It was a beginning, but notice how this scheme didn't last very long.

January 2000: Codes gave me a headache. Employing the less-is-more tactic, I ditched the fancy stuff and set up the home page to resemble a bimonthly magazine cover featuring a new piece of art per issue. The galleries were constructed in simple paragraph format with a linked thumbnail on the left and its description on the right. Of course, my biggest challenge was having something to display every two months!

May 2001: It was the debut of columns and "nori" background, a design style I stuck with for a while. The huge page headers and link buttons were a thrill to create. Buttons were in! Every web site needed buttons to flash, blink and do tricks when someone pressed them! Each gallery had different backgrounds and different colored columns, but functionality wasn't really dealt with. I was having too much fun with buttons!

March 2003: My blue phase. The header graphics remained big and gaudy, but the button fad wore out. Some major changes were made to the interface due to my fiddling with frames. Thumbnails that were once stacked in paragraphs were now arranged in mosaics, and mousing over them brought up their descriptions in the bottom frame. Full-size pictures opened in separate windows, and to keep the bottom frame occupied when there was no activity, it played a Flash animation. It looked good on the outside, but tons of escaped html code (%62%61%64%21) made it a nightmare to edit.

July 2004: Oh boy. I got carried away with crazy Dreamweaver effects and discovered the grief of cross-browser incompatibility. The galleries had a nifty feature in which a menu of thumbnails could be scrolled through, and clicking them brought up full-size pictures without loading a separate page. The more whimsical stuff included pixies that swarmed the title banner and could be swatted with a click. An earlier version of this insanity rendered little blood splats and sound clips of anguished screams— just because I could... on select browsers. Mousing over a tiny hotspot in the title banner brought Weed out of hiding.

December 2004: The first design under the official Vigistry.com name. After reading the book of Google Hacks, which explained content, link webbing, and recommended that a good web site should be at least a hundred pages, I put it to the test. That's the home page; look at all the content! And the hundred-page quota was no problem. The interface with thumbnails appearing in the top frame and opening in the center worked very well, which is why I don't wish to change it— just improve on it. I also started learning CSS, so that definitely needed to be improved. The fancy mouse pointers (sword, heart-and-arrow, and laser gun) were a sign of my having too much fun with CSS.