The core of the website is built with WordPress since it provides a good balance of capability and simplicity. Even though a site may start with a few requirements, that can easily change with time. Keeping design simple and flexible in the beginning is a key to enabling rapid changes in the future. The template itself is an amalgam of modified CSS and newly-coded PHP. Again, not too much PHP. The header is a custom graphic of which many iterations were created. However, the solution with the most appeal had the fewest colors.

The template and style sheets were thoroughly tested with Internet Explorer and Firefox. After hosting set-up and configuration, I uploaded the site and it went live the evening of February 11, 2008.

I immediately went to work when I heard the Association had no online presence. I used WordPress for its flexible plug-in support and the modified the default template to use a custom header. As Secretary/Treasurer I thought creating a website wasn’t enough to fulfill my role on the Board. With my wife’s help we converted approximately 30 pages of Association documents to digital format. The grainy 20^th generation photocopies made my OCR software choke, so with time and effort it was all manually transcribed. Residents can open any document and easily search for keywords.

There wasn’t a lot of information to reformat so the job was finished quickly. I believe it was a quarterly publication, so each quarter we would post an index of the articles. That aside, the rest of the site was boilerplate information you see in every edition.

Every site I designed up to this point was static. The only exception might be some temporary dabbling with SSI (server side includes) that I never quite liked. This was my first attempt at using PHP and I really enjoyed it.

Once this site was complete and we passed the course, it served no further purpose. I moved on to MBA courses and said farewell to web design for at least another year.

The site didn’t start with a mission statement. It was focused on content. I would write articles based on science and technology each week. Some weeks I felt like the site was controlling my schedule. Rather than have it work for me, it was working against me. This is why most blogs fade away. People don’t want to feel obliged to write something—anything—just to fill their site with text.

This version of unsaturated.com sports the earth/globe logo. After 15 updates the site was no longer updated. The next version utilized the “online portfolio” concept that you see today.

You can see that blue was (and still is) my favorite color. Studies have shown it’s also the most popular color. I created a custom watermark of the TBP Bent—the object shown behind all the links. By now I had fully realized graphic design can make or break a website’s first impression.

This site was low on content. I scanned a company patch and converted a VHS tape to RealMedia format. This was around the year 2000 so RealMedia (RM files) were the dominant format. The website itself didn’t take long to design and this was the first where I used CSS. In particular, I like the background I designed. A company that “drills” down to extreme depths is symbolized by the wedge that tapers towards the bottom of the screen.

I’ve never posted my full resume on a website because I think reading resumes is boring. This is the new millennium, right? Why aren’t you marketing your experiences online? Selling who you are and what you’ve done is much easier when it’s presented in this format. Tabular or bulleted data is great for information transfer but not for conveying a set of experiences. That’s what I tried to do here, and what unsaturated.com is still doing today