About George's Universe

The first web page I ever developed, I decided I wanted to have an astronomical theme. I thought it would look pretty neat to have a starry background with links to different pages that looked like planets floating in space.

One of the biggest problems with my first web page was inconsistency in the design of the pages. I used large graphics as backgrounds and didn't have any standard theme of navigation throughout the site.

Eventually, I realized that the look and feel of my page was not very appealing. There was no unifying feel between the pages, the home page was too busy, and the pages were too long. I started developing a new site that would use some of the new features made possible with JavaScript.

I quickly became tired of the high-bandwidth Version 2 of George's Universe and decided in 1998 that the page needed a face-lift. I decided to make all the pages follow a single theme. I also wanted to get rid of a lot of the unnecessary information on the site because it made it look cluttered andit was difficult to maintain. Version 3 was the first version of George's Universe that used a single theme throughout all the pages.

Version 3 of George's Universe had inside pages that followed the same theme as the main page. I still wasn't using any kind of standard navigation for the entire site, but at least I had unified the theme of all the pages.

In early 2001 I had been out of college for several months and had learned a lot about web design and the business world. George's Universe V4.0 is the first time I used a very simple design with frames to keep a single navigation bar in view at all times. It was also the first time I designed the site in Internet Explorer and not Netscape.

In 2004 I decided that I could put to use a lot of the technologies that I learned over the past three years to create a much better site than Version 4. The result was George's Universe Version 5. I incorporated quite a few new technologies and expanded on my knowledge of some older ones.

There were two main improvements in this site. The first was the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to keep a consistent look throughout the site. CSS allowed for a lot of the cool visual effects, like underlined links onlu when the mouse hovers over them, scrollable div layers, and some other layout and design features. The second big difference is ColdFusion. All the pages are created using ColdFusion. I used ColdFusion includes to maintain sections of the page (like the navigation bar, header, and footer) in single files, rather than in multiple places. ColdFusion also allowed for dynamic content for the links and guestbook. A third improvement, or rather feature, was some of the JavaScript used in the site. Most notable was the hidable content boxes. This was done using a combination of JavaScript and Styles.

It didn't take long for my experience with ColdFusion, JavaScript, CSS, and other technologies to make v6 of George's Universe a new project. The biggest driving force behind this new site was the incompatibility of the old site with FireFox and other Mozilla based browsers. It seems that a lot of the JavaScript and CSS that I was using was IE specific code. Things didn't look too great in other browsers.

Because I used a lot of ColdFusion includes in v5, adding a lot of the content for v6 was pretty easy. So I spent a lot of time adding some new features and making sure that everything was compatible with multiple browsers.

Some of the new features in v6 include the new design, which is cross browser compatible and better organized.