Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Layout Graveyard ::
Click on thumbnails for full view; these open in a new window.
Version 9: a gorey demise
Oh, layout 9, you never-ending bastard! I made version 9 in time to celebrate the 5 year anniversary of William's Bloody Hell as well as the semiquincentennial Rant , and as such wanted it to be super-special, and it was. I was quite pleased with the artwork used in the layout. I had to combine several images to make the one, big layout pic, and I thought it came out divine. There were some minor cross-browser issues, such as the semitransparent iFrame seemed to work only in Internet Explorer, which was sad, but it was passable if Firefox and others with no major issues. It was a div-based layout with an iFrame for content, because divs were still giving me a hard time. This layout used a black and dark red (with grey is you used anything but Internet Explorer) colour scheme which fit with the art. The whole Edward Gorey theme came together so wall, and it was very easy on the eyes, that it took by surprise to realize it had been up for TWO WHOLE YEARS. Whoops! I hope you liked it as much as I did. For more on this layout, read Rant 250.
Version 8: Toasty!
Layout 8 is something of which I am quite proud. I had managed to keep the aligned and centered look of a table, but somehow learned divs to do so. Yeah, I didn't think I'd be able to do it either. It was the same basic look as Version 7, except without the burning red retina feeling, which was a plus. I really did like how the black in the image and each of the content areas melded perfectly with the black of the main background. I still had the black-red-darker red colour scheme which was adopted waaay back for Version 5, but my style sheets were still internal and I didn't have the time to change them all, but it still held together well. Unfortunately, the main header image was a tad too tall and it caused vertical layout scrolling which I do try to avoid, but could not if I wanted the image text to be perfectly legible and the overall image pleasing. Ah well. For more on this layout, read Rant 216.
Version 7: baptism of blood & fire!
For layout 7 I wanted everything to be perfectly aligned and centered, and I did it. I still had the table, but I did some different things with it, like the link rollovers to blood spatter. The welcome text was put on the Enter Page due to lack of space. I still like the black-red-darker red colour scheme, but that was really a lot of red in the main background, there. Sorry about that. Also, some people were annoyed at the horizontal main image, but I liked it okay. The horizontal image made it possible to keep everything neat, tidy, and centered without the visitor having the vertical scroll the layout AND within the content area, which is good. The title of the layout in the image though was kind of lack-luster, what with the plain Arial font and all. Another one up for more than a year, but I did rather like it. For more on this layout, read Rant 155.
Version 6: zombies of death!!
Well, what to say about layout 6? This layout had been up for over a year and I never did get tired of it. I only changed it because it occurred to me it had been so long and maybe I ought to try something new. I quite liked the main image on the left of me fighting off the zombies and thought it matched well with the overall layout. It wasn't perfect, but it worked well for me, probably my most "grown up" looking one so far. For more on this layout, read Rant 101.
Version 5: Good Grief
For this layout I took things in a completely new direction. I decided to try my hand at coding a table-based layout. This way I knew everything would show up right where it should in everybody's resolutions and screen sizes because their location would be based on the table orientation and NOT with div layers, which are subjective. As far as that aspect of it goes, it worked out well, positioning everything. I really liked the whole Charlie Brown theme going, but for some reason the picture really lost quite a lot of quality somewhere along the way, which kind of ticked me off. I liked how the red and black looked together, but just something about the overall appearance of this layout sort of bothered me. I think partly it was the scrolling marquee. That thing never looked good here. It was nice for the Silent Horror layout, but not this one. Also, I wanted to keep the vertical scrolling of the main page to a minimum and only have the need to scroll within the content frame, but that didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. I enjoyed this layout far more than version 4 because it was back to black mostly, but I'm glad to be rid of it now. Hey it'd been five months! For more on this layout, read Rant 81.
Version 4: Here Comes the Rain
So, for this layout I decided to change things around a bit. It's a 800x600 compatible layout, in a regular full screen window (not a pop-up). Some people had been annoyed with the pop-up thing, especially since the script I had been using would go into a pop-up that was already open, if somebody else used the same code. I thought it would be neat to make the pic of me overlap the "main" graphic and also the plain background outside the image. I really liked the dark blue that was used, and it took some time to decide on it. I think the little rain cloud over just me was a cute idea. Alas, just something about this layout never sat right with me; I don't know what exactly, maybe all the whiteness? Regardless, it was up for more than six months, and that was definitely long enough. For more info on this layout, read Rant 54.
Version 3: Silent Horror
This was my favorite layout so far. I love using black and I liked using grey scale rather than colors. It was still the same basic design as the previous layouts, but I think this one really finally showed what I had in mind, but wasn't capable of before. The basic idea of this layout was the old silent horror films I had been binging on at the time, like Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and The Phantom of the Opera. I was going to try and work a bit of animation into the background, some moving, scratchy lines, but I just couldn't get it to work out. As a result, there was a lot of just plain black going on. I was still using the CasablancaAntique font, and discovered that people who don't have it, got Times New Roman, and the navigation bar would be off. So sorry about that. I really liked the three little boxes on the bottom. They gave me spots to organize stuff in, like the online users and the new SOTM feature. The scrolling Linky! buttons were fun and jazzed it up a little. All in all, I enjoyed viewing this layout for a good long while , but after 6 months, it was time to retire it. For more info on this layout, read Rant 36.
Version 2: One Winter
Well, I was plenty more pleased with this layout than any previous. I had finally learned how to make a pop-up, so I had the main page in a pop-up. I did this because as I learned before, different screen resolutions can do funny things, and this way I had a pop-up 800x600 so I knew everything would be visible even in a low res. I really hate side-scrolling, so I didn't want anybody to have to do any of that. I also managed to learn iFrames and a little about Div layers, so I knew the main page would definitely look better than before with regular frames.
This new layout was fairly similar to the ones before, because before I knew where I wanted to be, I just wasn't there yet, knowledge-wise, so when I learned a few new things, I put them toward what I had bee TRYING to do. I knew overall the layout was similar, so I changed the color scheme to try and be different. Also, winter had just started so I guess that influenced me. Overall, I am not a big fan of white, and over time, the white and pale colors started to bug me. This layout was only up for about 2 months and I don't think I could have stood it longer. For more info on this layout, read Rant 28.
Version 1.5: Autumn Leaves
To say that this was my first layout would be a lie. There was a version before which was very, very similar, but not the same. It had utilized the same 3 frame-sets, but you could see their ugly, ugly borders! *Shudder!* Also, the pic on the left was different. It had no background, so it was extremely white and really drew too much attention to itself. So in other words, Version 1 makes my brain hemorrhage just to think about it and I had started tweaking it before it occurred to me to save an image of it. But you're better off. Trust me.
So Version 1.5. I knew I wanted to have constant images on the top for menu and title and an image on the left, but hadn't perfected iFrames yet. Therefore, I used regular frames. I like black very much and thought it was a good way tie all 3 frames together. I decided on a grey tone font instead of white because I felt white was too starkly bright. I also kept the "standard" blue-turns-to-purple link colors because I like those colors and thought they looked good with the other colors on the page. I LOVE the CasablancaAntique font, so I used it for everything. I hate small fonts, so I used an 18 point font nearly all the time. I started out the Home page with a song of the day because I like music and feel it is important. Also, I wanted the site to be as original as possible, so I drew the pic myself. It is a cartoony self portrait leaning on a tombstone because I felt that that was very much like a thing would do, since I like cemeteries. Autumn is my fave time of year, and Adobe 7 has a neat nib that does cascading leaves, so why not. I like this pic because I think it gives you a little insight to me; I like autumn, cemeteries, wearing black clothes, and that's a Misfits tee I'm wearing. The title "Autumn Leaves" comes from the book The Perks of Being a Wallflower. In the book, the lead character's sister gets a mix tape from her boyfriend called "Autumn Leaves."
I liked this layout because it was straight forward and simple. It let me learn some basic HTML stuff. But, I knew I had to eventually change it when I got more knowledgeable, as it was close to what I was going for for a look, but not quite there. Sorry I guess I had a lot to say about this one because it was sorta my first one and I feel special to have done it.
