Really, this page is just an excuse to print a photo of Sophie from 2013 that I really love, but I thought I would use this page to give some detail about the history of the site and why it looks like it looks. I am not a web designer, as if I were, this site would have a proper “dot com” address!
The site was started in 2003 via a website building package that was offered, free, on Freeserve. You signed up with an email address, and they allowed you to have a website or two. You picked the design you wanted from a list, and then you simply added pictures and text into wherever it let you do so. Each site was restricted to eight pages, but that was enough - at the time - to cover the magazine covers, diary entries and a few other bits and pieces that I wanted to detail.
I had several email accounts, so was thus able to get several “sites”, and the micro sites were thus developed via this method, as it allowed you to expand beyond the eight page max. The homepage had links to these micro sites, and once the eight pages of the main site got full, there would be a link added to “part two” of the main site. This explains where the multiple “Sophie-ography” pages came from.
By 2008, Orange had taken over and started by firstly, charging for the web builder, and secondly, changing the functionality of the whole program. You could add photos as a sort of gallery, which worked OK for a couple of the microsites, but didn’t really work too well for the main site nor the diary pages. A work colleague told me about Blogger, and with some experimentation, I was able to rebuild the main SDR pages via Blogger, and a new version of the Diary Pages, eventually with added images. Links were added to direct you to the revamped “Orange” versions of the Covers and Modelling pages, but eventually Orange abandoned the whole web builder concept, and these had to be redone via Blogger as well.
The original Freeserve site worked quite well - it was menu driven and although it did have one minor flaw, was quite neat. This is, at heart, a reference site - not a photo site - and so it did the job. Blogger does it not badly, the main issue is that each menu, often, is identified by the date the page was published, which usually has no relation to the date of the material included within that page! So it looks a bit DIY. But as long as you press the buttons it tells you to, it does actually work.
Blogger has other quirks. A few years ago, going back and amending published pages could see the text “un-align”, and rather than have to re-do that problem every time I wanted to add to the page, I decided the work around would be to publish a follow on page - “Sophie’s Books 2”, and the like. This does at least mean that some pages thus don’t seem too long winded, maybe it is good to spread the info around for ease of use and clarity. The only issue is that any page which I decide to me is thus “frozen” could well have some spelling mistakes, or in the case of the Music Videos page, a great big error, which I am too frightened to try and go back to change! But come on, we have all read a newspaper or magazine with a big grammatical mess in the middle, have we not?? There were also some “problems” via photo alignment a few years back, there are a couple of pages where you can see this ‘error’ in all it’s glory!!
The other oddity is, pages published at the end of a month have a big blank section if you keep scrolling down. This is designed to stop you scrolling down. And if you don’t? Well, the next “post” thus appears on screen. In other words, the website is designed to be driven by the menus, but Blogger is for people who like to churn out streams of consciousness, so is designed to show page after page en masse unless you try to fiddle it. You can’t, I don’t think, actually fiddle it to stop it from doing this, but at least I can try and stop you from finding this out by adding big sections of blank screen!
I like to think that, whatever the technical flaws of this site, it is at least kind of good at what it does - it does have some sort of design element, and is built with an admiration and love for it’s subject. SD, we salute you!
