I have been working on websites since 1998, when I first took an interest in creating my own pages. I taught myself html by creating a basic page with an on line editor (eg Geocities Basic Editor) then viewing the source code to see how it was made (click View | Page Source).
After a while I started to come across websites dedicated to helping others learn html. By far the best site I discovered, and still refer back to to this day, is Richard Rutters' Sizzling HTML Jalfrezi, which provides a general background to website design, describes each tag in detail, and gives real examples for visitors to copy and paste.
It was through Sizzling HTML Jalfrezi that I learnt how to do frames and tables, probably the trickiest little things to master in html.
The first site I created was Peta's Alien Resource Site, although it's taken years to reach it's current state, and is always "under construction". I've used the Alien site to experiment with new ideas and at one point filled it to bursting with silly little animations. Later I realised that this made the site impossible for my visitors to load, so I trimmed down the site and killed off the anims.
I came across FreedForm.com one day and realised that I could make my websites a lot more fun by using their forms. I'd copy a form from them, paste it into my site, then edit it to taste. I used forms to do surveys, quizes and submissions pages in many of my sites, and I know for a fact that the traffic to my Alien site increased massively after I launched the Alien Quiz.
I created Cyberdykes with my best friend Dawn because we wanted to bring together the images of our action heroes (stolen from other sites no doubt) into one place. We had a scream building it at first, but finally bored of moving little pictures around and not having anything to really say. Dawn was busy building her own site, Dawn Brayford, Lesbian Artist, and I was thinking about my next project. Dawn has since begun to overhaul the site, but I have effectively stopped editing it.
I started working on tomboy 2000
because I felt that there should be more sites on line for tomboys. This is undoubtedly true, and tomboy 2000 did achieve some notoriety for standing up to be counted. However, tomboy 2000 never really took off as a site. It's content was never as broadly appealing as Cyberdykes, and yet never appealed to the nerdy fanatic like Alien did ! It was pretty, framed and tabled from the start, and featured a couple of the forms I was learning to write, but it was never anything special. I've stopped editing the site because I simply can't be bothered....
If anyone would like to adopt tomboy 2000 please mail me and I'll think it over. As long as you're a tomboy yourself, you're in with a chance !
I met Phoenix McKenna just before the turn of the millennium. We are both lesbians and writers, and got on really well. Phoenix showed me her poetry. She wanted to put it on line but wasn't brilliant at web design. In the end I did it for her - and in the process decided to make a joint site featuring my own work. That's how Dyke Write was born, and I've been editing it ever since. I like the site. It's design should appear to be relatively simple and easy to read, nothing too flash or dazzling. I've avoided animations because there's no need to slow down a site that's mainly text and should load fast. One of these days there might be a piccy of the authors, but I'm not promising anything !
Dyke Write is my current baby. I work on it a couple of times a week, either adding new writing, or pushing through a new idea (like the Dyke Write Fab Site Awards or space for Visitors' Writing etc). I'm proud of the awards Dyke Write has won, and I hope we continue to attract publicity and attention.
I don't know what direction we're gonna take Dyke Write in next, or even generally where I will take my interest in web design. I'm thinking about doing a degree in multimedia systems next year, and I am always on the look out for a site that demonstrates JavaScript in such a way as to not baffle me.... But if u have any ideas, u know where to come....
