From the early days during a warm summer in 2006, going through chilly winters till eventually reaching the year 2008 Slevi.net has withstood the many dangers of time… okay, perhaps not that bad.
Things all started back in 2006, the 24th of July to be exact. It was quite a while since I actually did anything remotely constructive when it came to web development and I just felt like a challenge again. Time had became quite a limiting factor though as I was no longer in high school, meaning my days of doing absolutely nothing besides gaming, programming and scripting were over.
At several occasions I did play around with the concept of blogging but I never really got into it that much. I either limited myself too much by writing about a certain niche or the blogging platform limited me by being one of those desastrous free ones, yes I’m pointing fingers at you blogspot!
It’s all in a name
I was in need of something new, something fresh. So what did I do? Right, I set up DigiRev, short for Digital Revolution… Well such a name of course never brought anybody anywhere right? Quickly I realized this myself as well so I looked for something new, something a tad more personal and something which had a certain buzz to it.After pondering about it for days I came up with Slevi, combining the first letter of my first name with the three starting letters of my last name and adding an i.
The reason I added an i was because I thought it simply sounded better, the pronounciation in English is something I didn’t think about though and often I hear people pronounce the i as in ai, but to tell the truth it was intended as an ee sound, just like with wiki.
The first year of Slevi has been quite a tough one, at many points in time I just ended up writing total crap just to get an entry and basically shout out to the world “Hey, look at me! I’m not dead yet”. A feeling which many bloggers are probably more than familiar with.
Getting fancy
Design wise… well let’s say it was a disgrace, heck even myself I didn’t like it and in the end detested looking at it. It was green… with more green… pink?! What’s up with that, what must I have been thinking to combine that! And not to mention the layout, let’s not even get me started on that.
As you might understand, time for a change was at hand and so I created the 4th layout of Slevi. Right, might have forgotten to mention that before that horrible freakshow I had two even worse which lasted for just several weeks.
With this new design I was quite pleased and it really got me going again with Slevi, sort of like getting some fancy new gadget and all of the sudden you just can’t get enough of it. It doesn’t matter where you are or where you go, all you want to do is look at it, play with it and use it.
The designing process was great, I truly went all out and basically crushed all borders I could imagine. If it wasn’t for the “Lorem Ipsum” I placed on it I wouldn’t even recognize it as a blog anymore. Slowly it made me realize that I might have gone a bit overboard on that one and towned it down a bit, but not too far as I wanted it to keep it’s style.
After several months though the first issues with it began popping up, seeing it on various screens it simply was too dark for some making it look very plain and also hard too read. The design is also relatively wide, fine when I designed it on a 19” monitor and absolutely great as I’m working on a 26” LCD screen now but for example the displays at university… they just don’t cope with it all that well.
A fresh new start
It became time for something new, sooner than expected but a cleanup was at hand. For many months I’ve been planning on what to do next. Would the next step be even more graphical or would I tone down? With what would I fill things up, just blog entries or more? What is the actual focus of Slevi?
At spare moments in time I would just scribble around a bit in my little note book I have in my bag, place down some thoughts on this and quick design mockups. I would take a close look at what others have done and learn from that. But most important of all I was wondering, what is the actual focus of Slevi?
About 2 years have passed since it’s launch and yet there was no real focus, perhaps I should start considering to diagnose myself with an attention disorder. But then it got to me, something I knew all along. Slevi is all about my interests, what fascinates me, what keeps me going, what I enjoy doing.
So let’s make a design around that… the headaches which that caused me, you just don’t want to know! If there’s one person you would expect to know well it would be yourself right? I suppose I missed some sort of spiritual journey though since I found it hard to translate my likings into Slevi.
Time for a different approach, just do something! So I opened up Photoshop and I started off, quite soon already I impressed myself with what I placed down. It was clean, elegant and I liked it. For several days in a row I kept shaving things up a bit here and there, expanding on my previous work or simply touching things up a bit but definitely the occasional scrapping as well.
The finished product
I’m satisfied, most definitely. But finished is a big word, I’ve designed it in this way on purpose as there’s still many plans on what I’m wanting to add to Slevi in the future.
My mind is simply so full of ideas that it’s hard at times to pick a point to start off with but something which I definitely want to do is to move away from the idea that this is “just a blog” and expand it with long lasting content from within my field of interest.
One of the things which the future definitely holds for Slevi will be a medical section, how exactly this will be handled I’m not quite sure yet but I’ve had it in mind for so long it just can’t be left out.
As for the rest let’s just say the future has quite a bit in mind, so don’t miss out!
