Creative Spirits — History
Isn't it fun to dig in old archives and compare the before - after? I've done it for this site, and here's the result:
2000 — www.CreativeSpirits.de is born
Creative Spirits was conceived much earlier — I had always a name for what I did.
But in 2000 I decided to go for a website. This edition was made using frames and a typical Australia-related colour scheme.
Images were scarce and I didn't know anything about design, because most of the content was centered.
Site size: 900 KB
2001 — Content rules
Nothing much changed design-wise, however, I added lots of content in this year.
A new section introduced resources like book reviews, newsletters, newspapers and postings. I added many images of scanned slides of my travel through Western Australia.
CSS already rendered most of the styling.
Site size: 2 MB
2002 — A light redesign
Small steps towards "design": The navigation is left-aligned and the site features a breadcrumb navigation.
"Further information" links supplement my content at the bottom of each page about Western Australia, a service which should prove very time-consuming to build and maintain.
I add the elaborate feedback-boomerang. The site still uses frames.
Site size: 3.6 MB
2003 — The revolution?
Frames are done with except for the homepage and the Lyrics section. Images are no longer centered in the copy but jut out of the text to the right. And this feature works with Netscape Navigator 4!
Over the year, many movie reviews go into this new section. Images are sliced to facilitate load and make image fraud more difficult.
Colours are changed to create a less dark mood. I add a custom error page, a robots.txt and search functionality. But the site still lacks design and good contrast.
Site size: 6 MB
2004 — Colour and navigation
Frames are gone now. I'm still not happy with the colour scheme and make it lighter again to improve readability.
The menu tries to accomplish the difficult task to show in two levels where you are.
I add the "Web design" section to promote my web work. The site is HTML 4.01 strict compliant.
Site size: 13.5 MB
2005 — The revolution!
I no longer use a colour scheme which matches Australia's colours for the background. Following a trend and the long search for a decent colour scheme I move to a white background and subtle reds and yellows for headings and design elements.
My studies on design show results in a much better contrast for the copy, repeting design elements and lots of whitespace.
A different pictorial header for each chapter puts life into the design. I drop the labour-intensive "further information" links. The site uses XHTML 1.0 strict.
Site size (excluding downloads): 44 MB
2006 — Beautiful photography
2006 saw the addition of the 'photography' section. Not only wanted I to offer top class photos of my excursions but also a user-friendly slide show without the overhead of Flash.
The photo galleries received good feedback and are now a popular part of this site. Later that year I added a Javascript-based 'curtain effect' which opens the stage to show the galleries.
2007 — Content, content, content and Google
I have added much content to the site. Visits to the Indigenous Film Festival saw me adding movie reviews which eventually paid off. Google rewarded me this year with a #1 rank for 'aboriginal movies' and a #2 rank for 'aboriginal films'.
I added a new section, 'Aboriginal Culture', for which I started to write researched articles. I try to use as many Indigenous sources as possible to offer an Aboriginal perspective rather than a white one. One of the popular entries, Aboriginal alcohol consumption, ranks in the top 5 in Google.
2008 — A new domain with a bad surprise
Early in 2008 I moved from the de-domain to a info-domain. For once I am now living in Australia and for another my audience is mainly Australian-English and I wanted to reflect this with my domain.
However, I forgot that my homepage was in utterly bad condition. No SEO, not many links into my site, and consequently Google dropped my site out of their index after they re-evaluated it.
After about four weeks traffic pick up to normal levels again, but not after I had created a new homepage from scratch and applied some SEO knowledge. It made it clear to me how powerful Google is when you get about 75% percent of your traffic through organic search.
Two years after adding the section on Aboriginal culture, 9 out of 10 top visited pages are from that area.
2009 — You are gridding me!
Building on what I had learned about grids and vertical rhythm I relaunched the site, aligning components to the grid and restyling my text so that all typography aligned to a vertical rhythm.
Click on the image to compare before and after.
It was a pleasant surprise that the Uniting Church in Queensland voted my site "Website of the Week" in August.
This year traffic hit 2,000 hits a day for the first time.
2010 — Whats up?
Don't worry, I'll be working on this thing!
Watch this space.