Tech Cores Original Design

Back in November of 2008, I set out on a mission to release my very first website, Tech Cores. When I planned to do this, I already had a vast amount of knowledge with HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL. I knew quite a bit of it at the time, so I took those skills and turned it into a website that would become Tech Cores.

For about two weeks, I spent deciding on what I was going to call it. I wanted something under ten characters (TechCores is nine characters), and I wanted something extremely easy to memorize and type in. I'm not even going to post my list of the domain names I was thinking of at the time because to be honest, most of them are ridiculous. But I will say, "Tech Cores" was on that list. I checked if the domain was available, and bought it immediately.

I launched Tech Cores not too long after that; that became the very first Tech Cores ever created. If you want to see what the original Tech Cores looked like, take a look at this. It wasn't too bad, but to be honest, it was running off a CMS system called Joomla and a free theme I found on the web. Joomla wasn't, and never was, made for bloggers. And that theme I was using was so bad on many levels. I did modify the theme a bit (like the latest news, the background (which I actually made a long time ago), and of course, that first Tech Cores logo).

But a year later, I decided to remake the entire Tech Cores system with a custom theme entirely designed by myself alongside with WordPress as its blogging platform. Just ever so happens that I couldn't of done anything better. I was able to make a perfectly validated theme (unlike a good portion of WordPress themes out there) that runs extremely fast in the browser and looks great to the eye. The entire Tech Cores theme is around 400KB which is just awesome.

The main point of this blog post is to show you what Tech Cores used to look like in the beginning stages of recreating it. The original Tech Cores theme has never really been shown to the public before so this may be interesting to see what all of you think about the original design. I have changed quite a few things but it was for the best of it. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below on why I may of added something or even deleted it.

And of course, here's the full design below. Feel free to click on it to get the full resolution photo! This came straight from the original PSD file I created, so this is the original design with nothing edited. It's the first draft of the new Tech Cores in other words...