Vintage Schumin Web
In order be able to fully understand where we are today, one has to explore where we've been. The Schumin Web was launched on March 23, 1996, and in more than a decade of presence on the Internet, the design has continuously evolved as I've learned new techniques, changed styles, expanded the site, and periodically redesigned in order to incorporate a new look and make changes.
I first started paying attention to site design as an element of the site's history in 1999. Before that, site redesigns were done every few months, and considered kind of throwaway - pictures of site designs were not retained. From 1999 to 2004, the site was fully redesigned annually. Since 2004, the site has maintained a similar design, while changes have come more incrementally, tweaking the style and introducing smaller improvements over time.
On this page, my intention is to display some of the various historical site designs that Schumin Web has used, and comment on what each design brought.
March 23, 1996
Site Launch
The Schumin Web launched on March 23, 1996 as Ben Schumin's Home on the Internet. It launched with four pages, consisting of the home page, a "News of the Week" page, an "Information About Me" page, and a page of links.
For all that people say about quality-of-content vs. quality-of-design, the original design focused entirely on content, with next to no emphasis on style. The design looked very crude, but outside of an AOL "My Home Page" generator, this was my first attempt at making a Web site. And it seemed to work for the most part.
Fall 1996 – September 1999
"Frames" era
In the fall of 1996, I implemented framesets. The site design depended on a frameset to work, with the design usually involving a frame for navigation and another frame for content, and sometimes a third frame for a header. Several designs came and went during this period, with varying colors and arrangements. The design shown here is from fall 1998, not long after the transition to the name The Schumin Web.
During this period, the site carried several names. From September 1996 to September 1997, the site was called Ben Schumin's Internet Command Center. Several site designs were used during this period. From September 1997 to July 1998, the site was called The Great American Road of Ben Schumin, and was accompanied by a highway-themed design. From July to October 1998, the site was called The User-Friendly World of Ben Schumin, and incorporated a predominantly blue design. The site became The Schumin Web in October 1998, as part of a redesign to correct what I perceived as a bad design with the "User-Friendly World" design.
This period introduced the quote article in the fall of 1998, and the current rainbow logo was added in July 1999, replacing the oddly-angled block letters used previously.
September 1999 – September 2000
First "frameless" design
In September 1999, the site broke free of frames for the first time. The site was originally a very light brown color, and later changed to a blue-and-white clouds background. Navigation was accomplished via a single menu on the right-hand side of the page. During this period, I got my first digital camera, and pages that would later form the original Photography and College Life sections were introduced. This period also introduced a Web Cam feature to the site, since discontinued.
I first became serious about archiving content during this period, establishing the Quote Archives, and posting site updates. These would later form the Archives section.
September 2000 – June 2001
Introduction of sections
By September 2000, the navigation structure had reached its limit. It had become too long, extending beyond the bottom of the content panel of many pages. To rectify this, the site was organized into sections for the first time, and a number of older pages were retired. The original sections created were Archives, College Life, Main Event (now Odds and Ends), Major Areas, Web Cam, and Writings. The site took on a yellow appearance with green hyperlinks, and the www.schuminweb.com domain was introduced with the launch of the redesigned site. Additionally, the Online Store was introduced shortly after this design premiered.
June 2001 – August 2002
"Circles" design
In the summer of 2001, the annual site redesign focused on refining the 2000 design. This led to a design similar to the previous one, but it refined a number of elements. Visually, the darker yellow color now defined the navigation bar, and a gray header bar was introduced, carrying the site's logo and URL. All of the section graphics were now in circles. Section navigation was directly beneath the header bar, with the exception of the main page, where the section headers were in the navigation bar. The sections themselves were also revised, as the Online Store and Photography (then "Photo Essays") were split from Main Event. This design was later retrofitted for database-provided content, which greatly simplified the way the site was edited.
Design for this version was done on paper, and then designed for the Web based on the paper design. This is the only design to date where the original concept work was not done by designing a mock-up page for the concept, and then porting it over to a production model. In this case, the mock-up was built based on the paper illustration, and then the production model was created from that.
Of all the various historical Schumin Web designs, this one was my favorite, as it was clean, cheery, and made good use of the screen.
August 2002 – July 2003
"Minimalist" design
In August 2002, Schumin Web underwent another redesign. This design went for a minimalist approach, and was designed with the assistance of an impromptu online focus group (the first and last time I will use a focus group for design). The header bar was light blue, the main background was white, and links were blue. Site navigation was initially accomplished by two drop-down menus, with one for navigating between sections, and a second for navigating within sections. Days after the design launched, this navigation structure was significantly revised due to complaints about usability. This revision restored the section bar as a single line of text links, and enlarged the intra-section menu, changing it from a drop-down menu to a scroll box. Site content was not significantly revised, aside from a number of new photo sets that were designed to take advantage of the wider format. The section structure remained the same. This design also revised the splash page for the first time since its introduction in 2000, reducing the logo's size and adding a photo of me which changed monthly.
I adopted this design, replacing the "Circles" design, due to a desire to have a wider content panel. At the time, I was still designing the site assuming that the user had an 800x600 screen resolution, and I felt that having the navigation bar on the side of the screen with a wider content panel would make the site too wide and cause a horizontal scroll bar to appear.
July 2003 – October 2004
"Blue Cream Fade" design
The "Blue Cream Fade" design was a refinement of the earlier "Minimalist" design. This design responded to various complaints about the earlier design. A number of people complained that the site was "too white", and that the navigation box was too small. These were addressed and corrected by adding color, and splitting the section bar across two lines to make more room for an enlarged navigation box. The Writings section was dropped.
This design also introduced Life and Times to the site, designed to eventually replace the College Life section, as my time at JMU would soon come to an end. The idea was to have photo sets typical of College Life-style photo sets, but outside the college environment.
Life and Times, however, had a bit of an identity problem early on. The Journal was introduced as a feature of Life and Times in place of a formal introduction page in keeping with the "life and times" idea, and the original photo sets for Life and Times were sets that had been transferred from the newly-renamed Photography section. The Journal in Life and Times initially displayed the five most recent posts. This was later changed to 20, and then scaled back to 15. While it seemed like a good idea at first to combine a blog with photo sets, the Journal quickly outpaced the photo sets, and the juxtaposition of the two was somewhat awkward. Additionally, Journal entries beyond the cutoff point for display on the main Life and Times page were displayed in the Archives, rather than within Life and Times. This scattered the Journal across different sections of the site, and made things more confusing than they needed to be.
October 2004 – June 2008
"Faded Blue" design
By October 2004, the Journal's design had become frustrating enough that change was needed. It had become painfully apparent that the Journal was ill-suited for its configuration, and navigating the site via a scroll-box was just a touch weird. Thus when I redesigned in 2004, I went for a back-to-basics approach, which ultimately produced a site that had more in common with the 2001 "Circles" design than the previous two designs.
In creating this new design, I finally made the determination that I would be safe in designing for 1024x768. That determination meant that I had more horizontal space to work with. That new space would once again be filled with a navigation bar, doing away with the scroll-box design once and for all. I also reworked the header, and streamlined it into something smaller and more elegant. The color scheme went to all-blue, with a fade from a darker blue in the header. The section configuration was once again changed, with the addition of a dedicated Journal section. Additionally, the Web Cam section was dropped, and College Life was moved from a section on the main site to a separate subsidiary site.
The Faded Blue design was launched over a period of two weeks. Unlike previous redesigns where I was working with a high-speed connection and could launch the entire redesign in one sweep, I did this one in phases, thus operating a site with two designs at the same time. The first changes took the Journal out of Life and Times and placed it in its own section, on the new template. The Web Cam section was dropped at this time. Then each remaining section was redesigned, with College Life being spun out about midway through. The process was complete on November 1.
Following this redesign, changes began to be introduced incrementally, rather than in annual redesigns. The quote article was retired in early 2005, which led to a main page redesign that introduced the Photo Feature for the first time. The main page was further modified in 2006 when accommodations were made in order to allow the Photo Feature to display horizontal photos as well as vertical photos. Thus by the time the "Faded Blue" era ended in 2008, the site looked very different than it did in 2004.
From March 2006 to March 2007, the URL beneath the logo was replaced with "Celebrating ten years online" in commemoration of The Schumin Web's ten years on the Internet.
In 2007, while this design was active, the site was ported from a Windows host to a Linux host. Due to the extensive use of ASP, the entire site had to be redesigned. However, I still liked the design, despite having used it for three years by that time. Thus the new site was designed to look exactly like the old, with only minor tweaks, and rewrites of some older pages.
June 2008 – Present
"Blue Squares" design
In 2008, I refreshed the site's appearance while maintaining the design. To this end, I changed the background of the site from the fade to a blue "squares in squares" pattern, and tweaked a number of features throughout to better integrate this new look with the site's identity.
In 2010, the site was once again fully redesigned, with the end result looking very similar to the earlier design, making only minor tweaks on the basic design. The main thrust behind redesigning was to make a long-overdue change from a layout driven by HTML tables to CSS style sheets, as well as slightly widening the content panel. This was done to make future redesigns much easier, requiring the modification of only a few files to make big changes. With the site's already being somewhat taken apart for redesigning, many pages were again updated and redesigned, in order to improve writing and appearance.
