About Semicolon Software
The Beginnings
semicolonsoftware.de was started around the year 2001 and first served as a personal portfolio on some of the webpage that I had created until this point. It remained mostly a design study, though, so my main use for the site was having my own e-mail domain and for uploading various files via FTP to share with work partners.
Various temporary designs followed (many preserving the oringinal orange color scheme), some stayed on longer than others, but all designs were eventually abandoned as I never put enough work into keeping information up-to-date.
Another recurring theme in my designs was gears as it was a way of conveying the concept of technology and progress.
Content Management Systems
After realizing that working with hardcoded HTML would always be too much of a hassle for me in order to keep the website updated, I decided to use a pre-made content management system for my future endeavours, and after playing around with TYPO3 for a while, I decided it would be the way to go. I quickly created a very basic design for my first tests, but it turned out that it would remain until the TYPO3 version of the site was shut down (by accidently deleting the corresponding database, but hey, what's a personal web playground for?).
semiCMS
The problem with TYPO3 was that although content management was very simple to do, TYPO3 was terribly hard to set up, I never managed to get my designs look 100% right and creating custom features for my site was nearly impossible because of the huge amounts of documentation that I would have been required to read before getting started.
As I had gained a lot of experience in PHP programming through other projects, I finally decided that a homemade XHTML Strict-compliant content management system would be the best way to go. I tried to create the best and most flexible solution I could and so I also wanted to give my best at creating a design for my new personal website.
On this attempt, I took my time while working on the new websites, so during the progress, multiple designs were created and discarded again. I liked the example above a lot, but as the css scaling turned out to be problematic, I tried out a much simpler design.
While this design was much easier to give a correctly scaling CSS layout, I quickly discarded it as I found it too depressing and lacking any traditional elements of the first websites. As I had bought a Wacom graphics tablet at this point, I played around with the idea of re-creating a more playful version of the original layout.
I was very happy with the comic style of the new design and how it used elements from previous page versions, but giving content to the site that could be comfortably navigated turned out to be nearly impossible, so I created another version of this in a more classic layout, the result being what you can see now.
I hope you like the way the new site looks and am looking forward to hearing your comments about it 
