What started as a simple redesign for Abby’s Petz Society quickly spiraled into a full-blown web design adventure! Over the past month, I’ve been hyper-fixated on updating my websites, and before I knew it, I had redesigned all five of them — and even added this blog! It’s been an amazing learning experience with a few frustrating moments, but I’m so proud of the results!

Pawprints & Code

I’ve been wanting to do something more with the root of my domain for a while. For the past 18 months, it’s just been a simple image map with links to my websites, but I finally decided to give it a purpose! After thinking about it and talking with a friend, I decided to make a blog so I could talk about my hobbies and post site updates. I’m using WordPress and using the Divi theme from Elegant Themes.  I’ve had a subscription to ET since 2009 and am still locked in with the 2009 pricing, I couldn’t give that up and glad I never did. I really love the builder. I have also done a lot of CSS and PHP customizing and am really pleased with how it turned out. I still want to add more of my pets to the Featured Petz section and do more blogging than I have but we shall see!

Abby’s Petz Society

I have wanted to make APS’ layout responsive for a while. I wanted to break out of frames and did so earlier in January. It was still a “framed” site but it used CSS and div tags to create the illusion of frames. That still wasn’t what I wanted, so I ended up scrapping that design and working on a one-column format. In addition to the redesign, I did some more PHP work on my crew section and the downloadable adoption center. Instead of managing a ton of separate pages, I now use just one dynamic page for my crew section and one for the downloadable adoption center. Also added a header and footer so if I need to make any changes to those sections I don’t have to update 20 something pages! The site is set up to use a different color palette (and Silly Spots images) depending on the time of year. So look forward to the change from the winter palette to the spring palette on March 1.

Petz Breeds Directory

The next site I tackled was the Petz Breeds Directory. I already blogged about that, so to summarize that post, I created a dynamic directory PHP page to display the listings, made the table easier to look at it by adding alternating row colors, extra padding, and also removing the borders, did a complete CSS overhaul of the color palette and gave the site a responsive layout, and added the ability for users to swap between light or dark mode. I still have a lot of listings to add, so if anyone wants to help, you can submit breeds directly from the website and I’ll approve them.

Petz Deco

The Petz Deco redesign was massive! I went from the layout I used on the site back in 2003, which used iframes, to a completely CSS-driven, responsive layout. There is extensive use of JavaScript and CSS. The front page is clean with buttons that let you know how much content is on the site, a scrolling updates box, and a carousel of images showcasing the newest content. There is now an About page which includes a timeline of the history of Petz Deco (I’m so proud of that thing!). The catalog section is now one page that will dynamically display whatever kind of content you want to see. Eventually, I’d love to add pagination so you don’t have to scroll through dozens of items at once — especially in the Playpens section!  I merged the Guides section into the Resources page and hope to update those guides in the future. The FAQs page is still there, with a few extra questions and answers, sporting a really neat accordion effect.

The Petz Warehouse

This site is an archive of all my old content from 2000-2007 so there will actually never be any actual content update, but I couldn’t ignore this site. TPW was a site that was very special to me and the community back in 1999-2002. So I gave it a little makeover, giving it a responsive layout and new color palette.

Whimsy

I could not forget my Babyz site. Even though I don’t play Babyz much (it just doesn’t grab me like Petz does!), I really wanted to give my site the cutest design ever. Since the site is small, I condensed it to one page and gave it the cutest color palette! It uses lots of CSS and OMG you must look at the gallery in the Brag Book section!!! It’s so freaking cute. I’m so proud of how this site turned out, even if I don’t update it much. I really should make some more content for the game.

After all the hours of coding, tweaking, and redesigning, I can finally say — it’s DONE! I’m beyond happy with how everything turned out, and now I can get back to what really matters… playing Petz!