~ MonteSite

Now hosted on my account here at: http://www.dot5hosting.com/, these sites were done almost entirely in Notepad, and were managed with FileZilla FTP.

There are some broken link errors, and probably other minor PHP scripting issues, caused when i moved them from the root of this directory.

2003; my first commercial site, for my sister’s business, now defunct, @ http://montesite.net/os/r2/home.html. This would have been much easier to build in a scripted user managed space like this one, but, unaware, I built it in raw html with well over 100 hand coded pages. The shopping cart worked back when we had a live paypal account.

2004; second commercial site, for local rapper Lil’ Dude, @ http://montesite.net/os/lildude/index.php. I started this one in php with a mind towards being able to add more functionality down the line, nonetheless it still remained largely an html based site. Not only has the artist changed his name, but they have since decided to go without a website of their own. In 2008 he set up a more modern page at http://lildude.net/home.html. It has been good for me to see this young man’s career progress apace, he has worked with many talented music biz veterans. Some errors result from my header and footer for montesite.net being moved without being adjusted.

2004; school project, and my first venture into really scripting, 
http://montesite.net/os/epiall/epiall.html.
I was very happy with this simple execution of a multiaxis reference system for links, a type of system that i feel is badly in need of wider use to allow people to navigate complexly organized and voluminous sets of data in more meaningful and efficient ways according to their current needs.
The assignment was to execute certain scripts within i-frames.
The content was never filled out, and I never got around to making the submission forms
work in the current environment, but it felt very much like a creative success nonetheless.

2005; school project, and my first screen capture video tutorial,
http://montesite.net/os/tutorial/index.php.
This is a tutorial about using ftp to access your UWM webspace,
it became obsolete the next semester when they migrated to a more user friendly environment,
this was quite a disappointment since i’d thought i’d finally done something that would actually help others. Some errors result from my header and footer for montesite.net being moved without links being adjusted.

2005; montesite.net vers 1: @ http://montesite.net/os/, I never really finished it, or fleshed out all the content I had envisioned, but it served as a great place to store content and links.

2007; Southway Bait Sales @ http://southwaybaitsales.com/home.htm. Definitely the pinnacle of my hand coding work, I spent ages getting the look and feel I wanted. Unfortunately it still does not function as intended. The creation of a linked bank and Pay-Pal account, a retail price and shipping cost structure, and the editing of an old VHS vid, took so long that we lost the password and the will to recover it.

Still hoping to whip this into functioning shape with the very minimal work it would take to make the paypal links work and post the best i could do with the vid edits. For now it makes one heck of a catalogue and business card. Like so many of my hand coded commercial sites, I took far too long making the design work for myself. Surely I hope to never belabor the art like this again, despite the fact that I enjoy it.

I take pride in graphic design work, but my efforts with Joomla have yet to obtain such a focus on the details of look and feel. In Joomla and Drupal, like any CMS or web app, the look and feel are controlled by off the rack CSS based templates that I have yet to modify or study in any depth, as i am still busy adding functions and content. I understand CSS, as we had to study it in school, but I never took to it like raw HTML, though it is the simplest of markup coding.