Matching the trends at the time, the site featured a prominent navigation bar at the top, with miniature pixel graphic icons and separators for a clean, minimalist design. Prior to this, my primary site was written in PHP and hosted on free hosting sites, and I had previously dabbled with content management systems like PHPNuke and the like. With free hosting becoming more of a hassle, I began the move towards pure HTML sites which required no backend driver. With the minimal server requirements, this site was hosted on a first edition iBook.
This orange themed site was designed to match the Caltech colors and serve as an effective home page where I could access most of my most used links by keyboard only (using Firefox's type-to-find). Here also began the tradition of making article titles the last phrase of the article itself. The site was largely concentrated on the front page, so the page hierarchy became overburdened as more and more content needed to be added. The site ran on an old PII/MMX 233MHz machine.
At some point on an academic break, I drew the tree that became the cornerstone of the front page for quite some time. The linkbar now felt like it belonged somewhere, and the text was now substantially prettier. The layout of subpages was templated for a consistent clean grey-on-white look.
A revision hardly worth mentioning, the transitioning of the site to the undergraduate computing cluster brought minor changes to the front page except the addition of the navigational graph at the bottom right. All other previously used server machines in my possession were converted to dedicated servers running applications like ampache or used for development.
The ultimate form of the “tree” layour used floating boxes for the navigation, a more refined set of subpage indexes, and also a transition to using SWL to automatically generate consistent formatting from simplfied markup.
During the summer of 2008 I got the inkling to redesign the page to have a more retro, 1990’s, Netscape navigator, HTML 3.0 look. The problem with this idea was that organizing the navigational system would be thoroughly trying (to resort to using tables!). Instead, the idea to convert all pages to look like scientific papers took hold. Currently, the design is extremely minimalist and clean, with a very strict structure. Here's to hoping it remains this way.