Welcome to Chronical This is my (Helen's) online... well chronical of all the web sites I has created over the years. While going through some of my archived layouts from the 20 or so sites I have made for the last 5 years, as well as the many layouts I have created for friends, it's hard to believe I actually made some of these layouts! While I have no idea where my talent went (after all the current SASSYBELLA.com layouts don't exactly require me to sit in front of the computer fiddling away in PhotoShop for hours now does it?), I thought I'd resurect my old portfolio site and turn it into a showcase of the good, the bad and the ugly layouts I once made. Nothing is sensored, even if they are embarressing! The navigational links can be found in my brief (as brief as I could get it) autobiography below. Don't forget to visit my magazine: SASSYBELLA.com - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE "short" HISTORY... Click on the web site names to see all* of the layouts. It started way back when I had to go to Saturday school in late 1998 or 1999. There I met a friend who introduced me to another world online. She had a personal site that included "cool" things like messages to friends (then called shoutoutz, or even worse "sHouToutZ") and her collection of photostickers that she had taken and scanned. So naturally I wanted a site too. Unfortunately for me, her's included nifty things like frames, and I pretty much knew nothing about web design. I discovered Homestead, and made my web site (under the username "angels_world") with the simple drag and drop method. I had everything from shoutouts, scans of my photostickers, little bio's of my favourite bands, a guestbook, and eventually a slam book. Over the next few months I played around in a "great" image editing program (that came free with my chunky flatbed scanner). I made backgrounds, edited images and had quite a few annimated gif's that I had collected online. I also was slowly picking up bits and bobs of html. A year later I knew a respectable amount of html, had a blog and wanted a beautiful hosted site. After learning ftp, I discovered Envy.nu and moved my personal site there. And then I discovered the world of fan sites... I created a few pages about Westlife off my exisiting Homestead account... but then this adorable boyband from the UK appealed to me from the pages of UK Smash Hits, TOTP's and Live & Kicking. With their cute fun songs, I was hooked. a1 made me smile and didn't seem to take themselves too seriously. And there were already too many awesome fansites for the likes of Westlife and the Backstreet Boys. So a1 DerFuL was born. It started off with a simple layout on homestead and wasn't anything spectacular. Fast forward another year I had moved it to Tripod, and the site included frames and an entirely html site, all coded by me in good old Notepad (which I still use). Throughout all of this I was playing around with my personal site, which had changed names so many times from the original 'Angels World' (before I realised every fifth teen girl's personal site was called Angel something), to Dreamy Eyes when I moved to Envy, then eventually Funky Love stuck when I finally found host. I had also discovered the awesome Adobe PhotoShop and I could edit and create some decent graphics. And playing with Blogger's then seemingly difficult codes wasn't so hard after all! Next up was tackling tables. It took me months before I figured it out, because no matter how many tutorials I read, none really made sense. But once I had that down... boy did I have fun creating tabled layouts with an iframe inbeded inside. After Funky Love and a1 DerFuL were booming, I started creating more and more sites. At the last count I had created 20 sites in total. I started cliques like Forever a1, before moving on to banner exchange sites; The Boyband Exchange, Creme De La Creme, The Real-Bitch.net Exchange, then an awards site: Real-Bitch.net Awards. Then I discovered the layouts I pulled together were quite pretty and people wanted to know how I did it. So I created a design/productions site: Contradiction Productions (named after my favourite perfume at the time) that evntually became SassyBella Productions. And various other a1 related sites were created. Oh and I tried my hand at creating another fan site... Eternally Blue. Which lasted only a few months because running two extensive fan sites and the zillion other smaller sites got a little out of control! Php was another big step, I learnt enough to be able to use php includes. After being hosted at so many domains by some of the sweetest girls who were happy to share their space, I really wanted was my own domain. a1 DerFuL was moving from domain to domain, from Tripod to Stargazed.org, then to SimpleNecessity.com and it wasn't ideal. I wanted a .com. I didn't get one untill 2002. I had bought SassyBella.com, after months of discussing it with friends I had finally settled on a name. So I moved Funky Love from Deep-Within.org, Natasha's domain to SB.com in mid 2002. About 6 months later I brought a1derful.com and the site grew even bigger. I then closed many of smaller irrelevant sites and discovered the world of fanlistings. So out popped a Burberry Fanlisting, Collette Dinnigan Fanlisting and a Blue & a1 fanlisting at Oh-So-Dreamy.org. With a few other's I had planned to open but never got around to opening. I don't even know how many group blog sites I had created on top of that! For the next year or so I was creating layouts for other people's sites. But as a1 went their seperate ways in 2004, so did a1 DerFuL.com, along with all my remaining a1 related sites. University and getting a career was becoming more of a priority and blogging at SassyBella.com became full of silly rambles. I had already been writing fashion and beauty features for the domain and I was inspired by other online magazines (including the gorgeous Catwalk-Queen by Gemma - a fellow a1 fan I'd known for quite a few years during our "a1 days"). I wanted to create something to show my "skills" and use as an online portfolio... SASSYBELLA.com the magazine was born in mid 2004. I wanted to have different sections that wasn't your typical "fashion", "beauty", etc, and a layout that was simple but professional and fun at the same time. After weeks of playing around with images and colours, eventually I settled on what you see online now, but in a nice neutral beige shade. Now I just run the one site and am quite happy to keep it that way. Though I still create layouts for friends... SASSYBELLA.com the magazine is what I do and the rest is, as they say, history. (Not that I haven't been tempted to started a Ben Adams fan site, now that his solo career has been launched since a1's split - or break as they called it. That part of me will never grow old.)