Having made it's mark on the Web and society, Sharpened.net had established its presence on the Internet by the year 2000. People were telling their friends about the site and the number of daily visits to the site climbed. In the first few months of 2000, there were days where over 50 people visited the site within a 24 hour period!
OK, so nobody really knew about Sharpened.net, and frankly nobody cared. What could be done to change this sad situation? Was the website simply not attractive enough? Heaven forbid. Nevertheless, I decided to take a hard look at the site and make a list of any improvements that could be made. Sure enough, I found more things that needed work than things that didn't.
The screenshot below is from early 2000.
So the site looked slightly better. I kept the same overall design, but added a pretty shadow to the sidebar on the left side of the page. This was hot stuff in 2000. I also redesigned the logo with a much cleaner, simpler design. So simple, in fact, I could recreate the logo from scratch in under two minutes. To get rid of the misaligned table problem, I got rid of the "Welcome to Sharpened.net!" message above the links on the left and made the the links on the sidebar fit correctly in both Netscape and Internet Explorer. My color choice also became more consistent as I tried to stick with simple reds and blues. I was starting to become an experienced Web developer!
