This Site
I created this site because I'd had extreme difficulty finding any PoDW-related content online. (It's become a bit easier in recent years, but there's still relatively little online about this show.) Well, okay, at first, I just wanted to make a web page about it, and then realized that I had virtually no content except what I could provide. Practically everything on this site I wrote myself--I did all the graphics (based on pictures other people captured, or I made them from scratch), and I wrote all of the content based on what I knew or what I was able to find.
This site's been a cumulative effort over the past 10 1/2 years and is the only comprehensive, updating resource for the show on the web, and the biggest Pirates of Dark Water site in terms of content. It's my favorite site to work on, and it's by far the one I'm most proud of.
I built this version of the site with Adobe Photoshop, did the image gallery and fan art thumbnails in Paint Shop Pro, and wrote the code predominantly in TextPad and EditPad.
This site is best viewed with a resolution of 1024x768 or above, though 800x600 will also work fine, with either High or True Color (16-bit or higher), in any browser. Let me know if you see any errors, please.
Site History
1996: Andorus's Pirates of Dark Water Page was born (at http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/7529/noy_jitat.html). I'd only started messing with HTML and webpages the summer of 1996, and this site was born that summer or fall, when I was in 10th grade. It had a description of the site, a list of the episode titles, and some links.
Slowly, over a couple of years, I started to add more content, by means of really long, detailed episode summaries and any pictures I was able to find. I also started the Fans of Pirates of Dark Water Webring, which I took down a couple of years later.
During those couple of years, I also moved my entire site--which, by then, came to be known as Andorus's Hideaway, which is still in use today--to Xoom (http://members.xoom.com/andorus/darkwater/), and then to Tripod some time later (http://andorus17.tripod.com/darkwater/). As I learned more HTML and acquired more resources and tools to shape the page, it changed several times.
2000: The site went from a white-text/black-background page to a frames-only layout and started to use more graphics, once I'd gotten Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Photoshop from work, though before that I'd messed around with inexpensive graphical software I got with my first scanner. I also expanded, adding more sections and content to spread everything out. I think the dictionary was born then.
2001 February: I used Adobe Photoshop and pictures that some awesome people sent me to create a more graphically heavy layout based on Octopon to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the show's debut. This was the biggest overall change in the site's history.
2002 January: I took the plunge and bought the domain ecomancer.net, which was inspired by PoDW, and moved my whole site there. The site moved to http://podw.ecomancer.net.
2004 September 6: Immediately following an announcement I'd made at the Dragon*Con Classic Cartoons panel, piratesofdarkwater.net went live, in what seemed to be the next logical step in the long growth and evolution of this site.
I made some subtle modifications to that layout, to allow for one layout for all resolutions instead of having users choose. I was extremely fond of that layout, and held onto it for several years. However, there were enough small things about it that bothered me, and as time went on and I became a better designer and more proficient in CSS and XHTML, I knew I wanted to update it, but just wasn't sure how.
2005 July: Seven months after graduating from university, I moved to rural Japan to teach English and ended up renewing my contract for a second year, and for the first time in the 9 years the site has existed, updates essentially ground to a halt.
Currently: I'm returning to the US in July/August 2007, after two years in Japan, but my time available to update the site has been and will probably continue to be limited. Over the course of nearly a year, I've been very slowly redesigning the site to simultaneously commemorate the 10th anniversary of the website (though the 11th is quickly approaching), and to accommodate a blog, to facilitate easier website updates as well as allow for general PoDW and animation commentary.
I took my favorite elements of the previous site and combined them with some new things to go for a design that's solid and simple and classic, but unique and fitting for this site's aim. Additionally, prior to coming to Japan, I worked for a web production studio and learned what web standards are truly about, instead of my self-trained hodgepodge of code. I'm implementing those across the site, and maybe I'll be able to implement proper accessibility standards as well.