The History of Straight from School

Olivia opened Straight From School in 2006 originally using Freewebs hosting. Various hosts followed, including Atspace, Sitesled and Celeb Hosting, none of which we would recommend! We are currently Olivia had previously owned a fan site for British actress Rachel Hurd-wood, and a "casting" fansite for future films adapted from series of books. Both sites never reached their full potential, so Olivia decided to focus on a multi-fansite, for all the actresses she admired. Addison previously worked on a fan site for British actors before being recruited by Olivia, her close friend, to help Straight From School. Read below for Olivia's account of SFS's Past. Be warned - copyrighted images, coloured scroll bars and iframes ensue!

Past Layouts

The site has changed so much over the last two years! Designing and coding layouts has never been my forte - so it has only been recently that we've starting created our own designs. Most of the following layouts were created by some very lovely designers, and we owe them thanks for helping me start the site off. Click the images to get a closer look at the layouts!

Version 1: Twin Designs
Comments: Our first ever layout - the clues are in the coloured scrollbars! We wanted the site to instantly show the visitor what the site was about and the tagline "Fresh Faces On The Big Screen" worked well.

Version 2: Little House Designs
Comments: An attempt at a 'professional' look. Hmmm. This look didn't last long, as the site went on a very long hiatus.

Version 3:Twin Designs
Comments: Although the layout didn't feature enough actresses to get across that SFS is a multi-fansite, we enjoyed the block colour! :)

Version 4: Unwritten Designs
Comments: The first layout to feature Dakota! Yet her image only appears in the right top corner, and again we wanted the layout to feature each actress equally.

Version 5: Twin Designs
Comments: Notice the rather exaggerated welcome message - my idea of drilling it into any passing visitors! My coding was awful for this layout.

Version 6: Miss Murder Designs
Comments: I loved this layout as it was professional looking and presented all the featured actresses through the use of a tidy slideshow. Yet for all the articles we wanted to write, the text was too small to be readable for visitors.

Version 7: Speak! Designs
Comments: This layout by Jade was clean and fresh and again featured all the actresses. I loved that the navigation was clear and the site easy to navigate.

Version 8: Lunazul Graphics
Comments: The images of film reels and cameras that were incorporated into the design helped to notify the visitor that our intentions were a little bit more than to provide just a multi-fansite, but a casting website as well. It really helped is to concentrate on elements of the site to expand. The television screen rotated flash images of the actresses, which I loved!

Version 9: Addison
Comments: This layout, however, was created by Addison. A layout we made ourselves? Shocking, I know. After many tutorials she decided to create a layout of her very own. We decided that in order to expand the whole site completely we needed to have a self-made layout as well as all our own written content. We focused on using non-celebrity images (after being enlightened to the dangers of copyright infringement!) in a way that we thought would give the site a sleeker, more professional look, yet still incorporate the theme of the site. However, the three column layout looked a bit .. wide!

We are still nowhere near to being perfect, or complete, but both Addison and I are happy with the large progress we've made, even though admittedly it has been over two years (gulp)! If you would like information about our current layout, take a look at Site Stats.