Ivy Tan

My latest blog design created in October 2008 for my blog nanyate?! The illustrations were inspired by the gates to Japanese temples called Torii. It’s one of the fastest designs I’ve ever made. I took less than an hour for the illustrations, and less than a day to code the site. I doesn’t quite showcase my skills but it’s something that isn’t too shabby given my time constraints.

It works on all modern browsers. I’m currently developing a mobile version for this design.

This is the first Wordpress theme I created for my current blog. The illustration of the pendant was based on a necklace I bought in Montreal. This is the first layout I created with full compatibility with all modern browsers. Many SEO techniques including valid coding and customized permalinks were used to ensure a high placement on Google and Yahoo!

The SEO optimization was a success! All new entries are placed on the first page of Google and received a pagerank of 4 very soon after its launch. The design was featured on many CSS galleries, the most notable being Design Meltdown. See full list here.

I was playing around with unconventional ways of designing a web log and decided on a horizontal scroll, instead of the traditional vertical scroll. In terms of search engine listings and global accessibility, such a layout will fare very badly because bots and browsers aren’t able to surf the site well.

In terms of design, this site was quite a success! It was featured on various CSS galleries and popular design magazines; the most notable being Smashing Magazine and Design Meltdown.

The site was designed in 2006 in Adobe Photoshop. The HTML and CSS was hand-coded on Notepad. The site took around 20 hours to complete.