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Ah, I remember the good old days. The word "Shakespeare" might turn up about 250,000 hits on the search engines. According to Google.com, "Shakespeare" now returns about 6,210,000 pages (the SRC has moved up to #9 in the rankings!). That is a lot of sifting to go through! That—and a major grade for my technical writing class—was the original impetus for putting this site together.

Considering that in two months (count 'em) I went from never having seen an HTML tag before to designing a working, framed site, I'm reasonably proud of what was accomplished on the original SRC project. Sometimes I'm even more proud of what was accomplished then versus what has been accomplished since, because it was more of a learning challenge at the time. But, truth be told, I'm still amazed at the progress that this site has made since it started as a few pages for a final class project.

The latest redesign of the site brings me up to seven in seven years. When I finished it, I started thinking about the life of the site and how the look and feel of it has changed over the years. This is the story of the site.

	March, 1997—my final class project for Technical Writing is completed. This lasted for a while until I got a little infatuated with background images for the next design.
	September, 1998—this one seemed like a better idea at the time than it does now in retrospect. The lack of contrast between the text and background (exacerbated by the smaller font sizes) made for tougher reading than it should have been. I was also starting to get a little tired of frames by that time, but not tired enough to ditch them entirely.
	June, 1999—this is the design that really starts the transition into the current site. Although it still used frame navigation (there were still more pros than cons at the time), I went for high-contrast (black text on white background) and better legibility (Verdana font, size="2") to jazz it up. This was the last version to incorporate the left navigation frame.
	September, 1999—anticipating the move from a free membership site to a unique domain, it seemed like as good a time as any to ditch the frames. This was the first reliance on Javascript for the site navigation.
	August, 2000—and then there was the most recent design, which is a perfect example of how graphics start to dictate design. I was always okay with the imagemap on the right (although I decided the additional overhead for making the nav links rollover really wasn't worth it after all). It also gave me a way of incorporating the appropriate affiliate graphics in such a way that they didn't totally destroy the aesthetics of the page.
	September, 2001—as functional as the previous design was, it was lacking in a couple of fundamental areas that made sitewide updates a tedious and time-consuming affair. Plus, I'd grown tired of the orange-and-black look.
	Febuary, 2004—and time passed. And the webmaster saw that the previous design had held up well for almost three years. However, it's always a work in progress, and tweaks needed to be made....
	Febuary, 2005—well, here we are in a new year with a slightly improved site. The SRC is getting ready to celebrate birthday number eight, and it's been far too long since I really weeded the garden, so to speak.

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