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SITE NAME : NQ Designs
MEANING : Nika's Quality Designs
STAFF : None other than Nika
OBJECTIVE : To offer free quality designs and tutorials that rivals those of the masters of web design.
This is a pretty lengthy story which covers the steps I took to attain my level of proficiency in HTML, CSS, PHP and other coding languages in order to transform my website into what stands before you now, NQ Designs! Also it explores how I really became interested in web-designing. I hope that the story of my journey will help inspire up-and-coming webmasters realize their vision and gain the courage to
become successful in the expansive world of graphic design. Also I hope that by shedding light on my struggles I can help my readers prevent themselves from making the same mistakes I made. My story goes back seven years when I was 11. I suppose it all started with Neopets. We all know what neopets is correct? Of course you must be familiar with the wildly popular virtual pet website which captured the internet world by storm when it sprung up in 2000. So if you know that much then you also know just how easy it is to get your account hacked. Well, to make a long story short, after my first account got hacked, I cried like a baby, had Neopets freeze it, and then swore off Neopets... for a month. The reason for my return was my growing interest in guilds. When I think of guilds now I just picture a collective group of obsessive harry potter fanatics debating on who is cuter. Heh good times. However back when I was 11, I had little knowledge about guilds. When I saw that my cousin was able to create a guild I figured that I could do it too.
It all started with ~*~*~Dollz~O~Rama~*~*~ . That was the name of my first guild. It was a doll-themed guild. At that time I was obsessed with those little customizable diva-esque dolls. As mentioned earlier, also at this time, I knew absolutely nothing about guilds or how to use HTML. I looked up the help topics Neopets had on guilds and basically taught myself the basics. I used this new-found knowledge to create ~*~*~Dollz~O~Rama~*~*~. My guild consisted of premade dolls, minis, dividers, and banners from other sites. I didn't know how to promote or advertise my guild. I thought the only way people could find my guild was by going to the guild headquarters' search engine. Back then the search engine was very primitive and virtually useless. So I was wandering why I wasn't gaining any members. Back then, I also didn't know that the number of posts decided whether your guild was active or not. I started neomailing advertisements to random people. I got some members that way. Then I started looking at other guilds to keep an eye on my competition and figure out how I could improve my own guild. They all had these neat layouts and I wanted one. But I hadn't a clue how to go about making one. I never just neomailed them to teach me how they made their layouts because I thought it was rude to just waltz up to a complete stranger and beg them for help. So I tried learning HTML myself. I printed out the html help pages from neopets and soon I had most of the simple codes memorized. But there was much more I wanted to learn.
I started searching the internet for html help and I stumbled upon the Holy Grail! And www.lissaexplains.com was it's name-o. It had absolutely everything HTML-related known to mankind. And the tutorials were so easy to read even a 5-year-old could understand them. I practically learned everything I know from that website. Any questions I had were answered there. This is about the time I learned tables. At first I thought they were so difficult but now I know them like the back of my hand. Now my guild was beginning to look so much better thanks to tables. I was really proud of myself. I remember thinking I was a real expert now. Ha! how naive I was. Now the only thing left to do was to learn to make my own banners and graphics. This was probably the hardest part. It was hard enough trying to make nearly decent banners on Microsoft(MS) Paint, but trying to find free image hosting sites to upload them was torture. But at this time, neopets still had photo galleries in their guilds so that's where I uploaded most of my crummy banners and stuff (which were made of different images copied and pasted together). Those of you who only have MS Paint to work with understand the agony. So just imagine how rediculously ugly my banners looked. But through much practice I found a way to save GIF images without it losing it's color which I wrote a tutorial about. You can find the tutorial here.
| Evolution of Guild Layouts
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However, soon guilds began to look visibly different. People started using div layer layouts which were totally new to me at the time. Websites like peachie.nu (no longer exists), sparrow.net.tc (now called cherysh.net), and crazeydragon.com (no longer exists) came about which offered free premade layouts to guild leaders. I wanted one so badly because they looked so cool but not a single site offered a doll layout. Therefore I only had two options left. I could sit on my lazy bum and just sulk about my bad fortune or I could make use of my time and learn a new trick. I chose the latter. Even though I only had MS Paint I decided to create my first layout. Here are a few of my first div layer layouts. I learned how to make divs by looking at the html coding for one of crazeydragons's layouts. So now I had this hot-looking guild and all I used was MS Paint. Not PSP8 like I do now. I guess after I reached 100 members, I gave up on the guild. I couldn't keep it up. My personal life got in the way. I deleted my guild, and for some crazy reason all my accounts got frozen except for neoqueenfifilala. I quit neopets again. And this time I didn't return for another 6 months.
| First Attempts at NQ Designs
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I was 13-years-old. I was so bored that I decided to check on neopets. I was amazed at how much had changed. This is when I decided to make a neopets help site. It was called Neoqueenfifilala's Crib. Here is a preview of how it looked. As you can see, It was an eyesore and not much had progressed. That's because I grew attached to a guild which took up most of my time. It was called ~~*neo_ville*~~. I easily became friends with everyone from that guild. I started making banners and layouts for the guild. Everything was going great. I became co-owner and that Christmas I got Paint Shop Pro 8.0! Here are the layouts I made for that guild. But once the leader quit and appointed me as new leader, everything went downhill from there. First of all, I didn't have the time to run a guild again. Secondly, two council members deleted all the inactive members thinking it would help the guild, and third, some new members joined, said something offensive on the boards, and made all the members turn against each other. So when the former leader decided to come back, I was jumping with joy. Good timing too because my computer crashed and I wasn't able to log on for a month. But I enjoyed that short time away from neopets so much that I didn't log on for another four months.
This time I came back for my website. I was going to complete it no matter what. I understood a little CSS prior to this but I decided to learn it all, because it was summer and once school started I wouldn't have this much leisure time. For my website, I combined all my knowledge together [Tables, Div Layers, and 2 Column Liquid Layouts (which I learned in the summer of 2005 thanks to www.glish.com/css)] and I changed the name to Neoqueenfifilala's Designs. On July 4th 2005, I opened Neoqueenfifilala's Designs. This time I wanted my website to focus more on tutorials. I hated the fact that nowhere could you find tutorials for absolutely clueless people like me. Most tutorials require at least minimal knowledge of web lingo but what do you do when you don't even know that much?! I decided to change that and write my own tutorials. Over time, of course, I began to incorporate more anime graphics since they were in high demand at the time but from the very start, Neoqueenfifilala's Designs was meant to be a tutorial site. I waited until I felt I had a substantial amount of content before exposing it to the world. As time passed my graphic making skills improved and so did my coding skills. At first my site was hosted on freewebs.com but then when I saw that I had to sign up for a third account just to hold all my content, I knew I was in desperate need of a host.
In November 2005, I moved the site and changed the name to NQdesigns.net.tc. The site was now hosted at cjb.cc, a free server yes, but a free server that allowed php and 50GB of disk space. I thought this was going to be my permanant home, up until the unbelievable happened! For reasons I still don't understand, my hosts' server crashed which resulted in the permanant deletion of every last one of my website's pages. Was I mad? Oh yes! They were completely irresponsible and gave us no notice of what was to come. Of course now I had to look for a new host. Remarkably, the wonderful Leiko of soundless-words.net offered to host me. Now I had to work at reconstructing my site from scratch all over again. Even though it seemed to take centuries to revamp the site, NQDESIGNS was reopened on April 11th 2006, better than ever! NQ Designs was hosted at soundless-words.net for a year with no problems.
Over time, I began to widen my horizens and began incorporating onto the site much more than just neopets layouts and tutorials. By 2007, NQ Designs was dishing out mp3s, manga translations, transparent pngs, awards, videos, web layouts, myspace layouts, glitters, and more! I was gaining steady traffic with at least 800 unique visitors a day! However as summer rolled by, I started to lose interest in NQ Designs, believe it or not. Once I conquered all my goals I didn't really know what to do with NQD anymore. Needless to say I had a very strong desire to close NQD at it's peak. However I didn't need to since my host, soundless-words ended up discontinuing her hosting service, and thus NQD was lost forever... or so everyone thought. Around Christmas, I started making plans to bring NQD back from the grave. However I wanted NQ Designs to be different than before. I wanted to concentrate more on the resources and tutorials and less on the designs since they were all neopets/anime based. This time I made a concienteous decision to make the site more generic, appealing to all audiences rather than just anime/neo-lovers. Finally by January 1st, 2008, NQ Designs re-opened with a new look and a new objective: To conquer all areas of design. In spite of that, there's still a long road ahead of me. Although I'm happy for how much I've progressed since I first started this site, I still have a lot to learn. I won't be fully satisfied until I totally master FTP, PHP, and MySQL.
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• News Feed •
August 14 2008: One New Affiliate: Please welcome Flamboyant!
August 12 2008: Added 2 New Manga Samples : 1) Lovely Complex and 2) Hana Kimi
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