By the fifteenth of December, my head was clear, and I could view my site with clear eyes. I looked for the good, the bad, and the salvagable. I found it. The new site is merely a twist of a kaleidoscope away from Version 4.0. The key change, the underlying decision, was to place the emphasis firmly back on the content.
Content is king, and without it, no site is worth revisiting.
Using the colors and the font of the last version, I fashioned a new navigation. I got rid of the fluff and the floopiness, preferring to see a page that didn't worry about being clever, but laid it on the line. It is the clarity of the site that makes it successful. The clean lines, the focus on text, the clear identification, these all put the focus back where it should be. In early March of 1998, I added a little bounce by staggering letters in section headers and creating an initial directional page that allowed the user to choose her destination immediately, and provided a space for the caustic comments that had nowhere else to live.