About

This site has been up in one form or another since August 20, 2003. And it's been through a lot of changes!

In the beginning, when I had no knowledge of HTML or CSS, I just made a Geocities account and used their Pagebuilder. I didn't expect the page to get big; I just wanted to say I had a web page with my name on it. All the page consisted of was a picture, a description of Calvin and Hobbes, and links. It was lacking, to say the least. I added some more sections, and even built a logo out of a Calvin and Hobbes image and Geocities' clip art, but there was still something missing. Since there's no available web page of this design online, I'm just linking to a site that looks like it. This design didn't last long.



By December 2003, I was learning about HTML and Javascript, and decided to create a new design. How did I make it, you ask? I literally took the design of a Simpsons site, made it blue, and put Calvin and Hobbes on it. It was clearly designed for 800x600, and was pixelly and crooked. You wouldn't know it now, but at the time, I was ecstatic about this. Here's the template, if you're wondering. This is the "less pixelly" version of the design.



By June 2004, I got tired of seeing this clunky, crooked page full of dead links, so I switched to Freewebs and created a new design from HTML. It was actually based off of a design from Blogskins.com, but I can't remember which one - it looked nothing like this, though. On August 6, 2004, I launched my third design. It's a little rough around the edges, but for the most part, I'd say I like it. Because of Freewebs' limitations at the time, the site broken was into three accounts: kim_belding, the one with the essential information (Books, Watterson, etc), calhobbes, the one with site-based information (Links, Awards, Copyright), and hobbesman, the one with all the fun stuff (Movies, games, CalvinClub, etc). You may notice these accounts in the address bar as you browse through the site. I downloaded a 30-day trial of CoffeeCup Flash FireStarter, and made a logo with it. Now I wish I used Swishmax, to get rid of the link to their site at the bottom. The main page is valid HTML, which is really nothing to worry about, but still an accomplishment. This was by far the longest-running design.

Now we approach our fourth design, in January 2007, nearly three years after the last. After viewing the archives of Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's, I realized how much I missed such a well-designed site. At the end of the day, I whipped this up. It does look a lot like the other Calvin and Hobbes sites around, but they all owe their debt to Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's too, as far as their design is concerned. The main point of this design was to fix up everything behind the scenes, such as:

The entire site under one roof; not three accounts
The entire site layout editable from two files
The entire site design editable from one CSS file

There's also a heavy amount of PHP working throughout the site too, something I couldn't do on Freewebs. The entire right column of the site (CalvinClub, Buy, Poll, Quote) is configurable via PHP. So as you can see, this design is mainly done for technical purposes; but it still looks nice.