Home :: Interface History

The work done to produce the Epoccontinuum and the newly-divided sub-domains required for Ronald to focus more on the scripting and databases, while the graphics were pretty much an after-thought. Although the RDWonline series finally had a bright incarnation to list in its history, Ronald decided that it was time to bring the design back to more of a darker, abstract yet professional vibe. Furthermore, a more concerted effort to push the PHP codebase over to an object-oriented tree was made, as each page now executes a single derived object in order to render the markup for display. While this tableless design was more compacted than its predecessors, the overall execution was indeed harmonious and required little effort in ensuring that the design rendered as intended across the major web browsers. There is no real reason why this website has the surname Seoquouloxolocadium, but it seemed to fit with the somewhat abstract theme of the website design. This is also the first website produced by Ronald to exhibit full separation of structure, presentation and functional behavior.

On September 6, 2004, Ronald embarked on yet another long journey to redesign and rearchitect RDWonline. The interface for the OmniFireball was enclosed, and all the predecessor websites used dark colors with white text for the staple layout. So this time around, Ronald brightened up the color scheme a bit, modeling his old black-purple-teal Reebok pumps (sans black). This website has the surname Epoccontinuum not because it was a work-in-progress for 20 months, but because the design and theme was formulated to integrate elements of time, clouds, ice and glass to better illustrate the elevation of Ronald's web prowess using the same tools as before and new technologies such as Ajax and JSON.

The Internet is plagued with poor web designs and horribly-formed web pages. One major reason Ronald felt the need to rearchitect (not just redesign) RDWonline is to reinforce the importance of creating structure and presentation that is W3C-compliant for the most part. With graduation from graduate school coming in the following semester, Ronald melded RDWonline Designs & Productions and his personal website together with The Gravity Realm, rdwmusical and rdwmagicollection to create a 200-page website that he actively used as his conversational piece for forthcoming job interviews in demonstrating his web graphic skills and web programming prowess. The website has the surname OmniFireball because of that, and the fact that Ronald used 10 different applications in variance for its design and assembly.

Ronald redesigned his website in hopes of using it to supplement his application to the School of Library and Information Science gradaute program. The website was renamed to RDWonline, and in celebration of that the audio theme was chosen after Ronald created a stereo using only Photoshop. Ronald likes to consider this website the 'minimalistic' and 'self-titled' incarnation since he focused on the basics of web design and development, using only Photoshop (with no 3rd party filters), Fireworks and Dreamweaver to create this entity.

While working on the beginning artwork for The Gravity Realm, Ronald took one conceptual piece and developed it into a large red pipelike structure, which ultimately became the interface to this website. The content of this website had almost tripled with the addition of Ronald's final chemical research thesis and information on other favorite pastimes. At One of the cooler features about this website was the Javascript double rollover used for the navigation.

The very first release had very humble beginnings. This website only consisted of 5 static HTML pages with Ronald's picture and a gradient image for the background. At the time Ronald was still very much a neophyte when it came to web design, however with the new release of Adobe Photoshop 5.5, it only made sense at that time to develop a small website dedicated to his chemical research papers and favorite pastimes. Unbeknownst to Ronald, that website would set the foundation for all of its successor websites.