About This Wee Website

In this page you can read About Zany Hovel.

Zany Hovel's Mission Statement

I strive to work in more and more things horror with mires to organize those who are passionate about horror to make great horror genre works, I know that to achieve this I need to connect more with horror fans on social media sites. Hopefully some day I will be known as someone who explored all avenues available in the horror genre.

This website is important because it will be a repository of all the horror stuff on the web that is not easily visible through common search channels.

Zany Hovel 's Technical Specs

Prolly 98% of this website was developed with Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 Educational Version, and Photoshop 4, on MacOS 9, running on the SheepShaver Macintosh emulator.

In some moments, when I ran into a bug and it got very difficult to fix it, I used Kompozer v0.8b3 on Windows. Kompozer was faster and in genral ordered the code in a pretty way that made reading it a lot easier.

I did a lot of style sheet retouchs live, with Neocities' editor.

This is how I developed this website.

First, I created the template by designing the structure with Photoshop. Then I saved it for web, and imported it into Dreamweaver.

For the homepage navigation I used Photoshop 6. I sliced the hovel's image. Then I created rollover images with Dreamweaver.

Other programs that I used are Gravit Designer (vector editor for Windows), to make the logo. Once I had the logo, I created the animation with Photomosh, a web app. To embed the animated gifs into the hovel's slices I used Photopea, that is an online photo manipulation app that more or less has all the features of the old versions of Photoshop.

I tried using two features of Dreamweaver 4 but they didn't work for me and they were a headache while I was fighting with them. One was the library feature, a nice idea, only that it didn't work for me. The other was the layers feature, also, it gave me a lot of trouble so I stopped using it.

To test the site while I was developing it I used two browsers. In the first stages I was using Netscape Communicator 4.6, but after some improvements, it stopped rendering the site correctly. At that point I started to test it with Clasilla 9.3.2, and used that browser to the very end.

So you Wanna Create a Retro Site?

My best advice for others who want to create a retro static website from scratch. I don't care if you want to use vintage apps to do it or not. Just bear in mind that it can be problematic.

Whatever development environment you decide to use, the best advice I can give you is this: first create all the functionality in a single page of your website. Suppose that your website is going to have five pages plus the homepage.

Work only on the homepage, create everything there, once the front end stuff is finished, add all the invisble integrations you have in mind, like for example widgets, by editing the code and pasting any snippet you need into it.

Once you did all the structure of the page, both front and back ends, when you are sure that you will not have to fiddle with code anymore, and when you are satisfied about how the site looks, only then create the other five pages, by making a copy of the homepage for each of the other five pages of your website.

Until then, you will not have written a single line of content, or added a single image or photo in the content section of the pages. Which is to say, start to write the content, and add the text and content-related images to the pages only after you finish developing all the structure and the functionality.

I say that it may be problematic to create a website with vintage apps because you may want to add features that didn't exist when those apps were released, and you will have no way of checking your pages directly. You'll have to load a modern browsers. So, if you are using an emulator, it becomes kind of a hassle.

Media Credits

Thanks to all these persons, who kindly shared sourced media with permissive CC licenses.

IQRemix: Rutherford Manor Haunt - Edmonton / Hans Splinter: tinsmith at the midwinter fair / Stephen Day: Haunted House / Boris Kasimov: _BRK5851 (1) / waferboard: red mask / JBLM MWR: IMG_9246 / MockLogic: Haunted TV / anna-maria v: haunted hause 2 / K Tao: Souls of the Forsaken / Steve Snodgrass: Haunted House Ride / leKorbo.be: Kelgelbahn / Mel Possehl: weathervane-191076_1280 / Lee Russell: Abandoned Nursing Home

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