[ full moon over crystal tokyo ] - a bishoujo senshi sailormoon fansite

Ah, Memories of Full Moon Over Crystal Tokyo... Well, just for old time's sake, I decided to put up a gallery of all my previous layouts. (Don't know who's interested in that sort of thing, but I figured I might as well put them up seeing as I still had them...) You can click on the thumbnails to see a larger version of the image (although why you might want to is beyond me...especially where my eariler work is involved...).

FMOCT Dreamtime

FMOCT v 7.0

My last layout was the first tables-only version of the site since way back in 1995 with Sailor StarFire's Sailor Moon Page. It featured a Photoshopped image of a woman from a prom-dress ad I found that I doctored to look like Michiru in her princess dress...

It took a lot of work fixing that image to look like Michiru! It might look like it was a simple color-change-blur-a-bit job, but trust me, I worked for hours on that thing... She was originally sitting in a giant bolt (?!) that I cut off in such a way as to make a crescent moon. I had to make her hair longer and wavier, change the color (obviously!), change the dress color, add straps and her shawl, and other various random image-fixing-things.

I loved this layout because it was a lot more elegant looking than any of my previous layouts. I made the mistake of using Dreamweaver's "template" feature - supposedly a time-saver, it makes a version of your page on which complete your layout and dictate editable regions - so you can't accidentally mess up the spacing of things or your tables when you're adding content to your pages, etc. Supposedly, if you wanted to change something on the template, you just did so and uploaded the new template and it was supposed to initiate the changes on all the pages that used that template...

Yeah, right.

So I didn't realize until after I had done all four-hundred-something pages of the site that you have to re-upload every single page that uses the template for the new changes to show up on them. Needless to say, I didn't do much updating! I've recently found a MUCH easier way of doing what I wanted to do in the first place, so this is a lesson well learned...

Garnet Memories - The Setsuna Layout
FMOCT v 6.0

The last of the Senshi collection I started... I was planning on going through all of the main Senshi with the same style of layouts, but to be honest, I got really damn bored with them after this one.I was sick of the way it looked, and the colors got really annoying. I wasn't as happy with this one as I was with the Saturn layout in the same series, but I suppose it was OK... Red never really was my color. I was also getting frustrated with the few small links by the side of the topbar - I didn't know where to put them where they would be visible on any resolution and still not clutter my layout...

Violet Silence - The Hotaru Layout
FMOCT v 5.0

Well, this one is a little bit different-looking than my previous layouts, with it's round-cornered-ness... StarFire's dad accidentally killed a whole folder of her stuff (including all her HTML for all her sites, as well as all the banner requests she's done over the years for people) while switching her to her new computer, so she had to start from scratch layout-wise. I really like the way this one turned out, though - it's actually one of my very favorites. I love the colors, and the round corners are much less harsh than my previous square cornered ones. This one was also designed with my new screen resolution, 1024x768, in mind, though it still looks good on 800x600 monitors.

Symphony - The Haruka Layout
FMOCT v 4.0

This is the Haruka layout that corresponds with the previous Michiru one... I kept the same splash page because I wanted to keep the theme going. I'm not really keen on the pic I used as the sidebar, and I think I eventually sucked it up and just went in and changed the stupid thing (I was lazy and didn't want to rewrite my code, so sue me). The only problem with this layout that I found was that the stupid sidebar didn't want to connect all the way across... (I think I finally went in towards the end of its run up and figured out I had an image size written in wrong or something stupid like that...) And it only took me just shy of, what, a month or so to get it fully up? D'oh, StarFire...

Symphony - The Michiru Layout
FMOCT v 3.0

The original Michiru layout is probably still one of my favorites (aside from this multi-character one, my last Michiru layout, and the purple Saturn one of course - she really seems to make wonderful layouts for some reason)... There weren't any real navigational problems that I was aware of, and I really liked the sidebar image! I am disappointed now that I hadn't figured out how to do round-cornered layouts - I think it would have looked much more feminine without the harsh angles... The splash page was cool, too. (You'd never guess how long that frigging thing took me...) This layout was made in celebration of being hosted by Jenn-chan of Tennyo.com...

FMOCT Inaugural Layout
FMOCT v 2.0

My first ever frames layout!! I really liked my little splash page for this one - I colored in the chibi-Haruka and Michiru myself way back when I was just beginning to experiment with Photoshop. (Of course, I never made a non-frames version like I had written for the choices on the index...) Anyway, this layout was OK, but it wasn't consistent all the way through the site...It was a little hodge-podge on some pages. Also, the header bar and side navigation frame weren't connected so things were just kind of floating...

Sailor StarFire's Sailor Moon Page
Pre-FMOCT v 1.0

Oh my Lord...::cringe shudder:: I remember this... An evil, evil Angelfire WYSIWYG-editor page! I even had that cheesy stock-starry background that every other Angelfire page has... This was by far my very very very worst layout, but it was also my very first page - all the way back in the dark ages of 1995-96. Before it even became known as Full Moon Over Crystal Tokyo. (And I used the dubbed names because I knew nothing about the original series.) Yikes. I pretty much just included this in here so we can say, "See how far StarFire has come!! Isn't this site just so much better than it was originally?" Text-linked image galleries, auto-starting midis, massive page header-images, scrolling marquee text - I had everything on here that you shouldn't put on a web page. Eesh. (But I still quite fondly remember how proud I was of that darn thing. And I got quite a few compliments on it...)