History

I first started this website in June 2006.
The first and second version was hosted on a Googlepage. It stayed there until the end of 2007, but it was little updated, due to the lack of organisation possible on a Googlepage.

In January 2008, the site was moved to Freewebs, but after using it for a while, I decided I didn’t like this host either. (yeah, I’m fickle ) Most annoyance stemmed from the fact I used the free host, because I couldn’t afford paying for it.

In the summer of 2008 I moved my site again, this time to awardspace. I purchased a domain from awardspace, so that I didn’t need a subdomain anymore. The site was hosted on awardspace for free for a couple of months, until I found out Jenny from The Whole Horizon was looking for new hostees.
I contacted her and she immediately agreed to host me. So I made a final move from awardspace to The Whole Horizon, while keeping my domain.

In Februari 2009 I made another huge change.
Due to the fact that my cutenews installation refused to let me log in. Because deleting and re-installing didn’t solve the problem, I decided to change to another news management system: WordPress.
With Jenny’s help and her suggestion of using WordPress as an entire content management system, this is where gawariel.com is today!

Why

Why did I start this site? Good question, lol.
I first started learning photoshop back in 2003 together with CSS/HTML, because I wanted to create a personal layout for my livejournal gawariel. And from there on out everything started.
In 2005 I created a livejournal community – gawariel_design – where I could share my livejournal layouts. To my surprise and delight this community became very popular, with over 8000 members today.
As time went by I started not only posting layouts, but also wallpapers, icons, tutorials, …etc. And that’s when the idea of a site came into my head.

Current Version:

This version of gawariel.com was put online in March 2009. This is the very first WordPress theme I have ever created and I am rather proud of it.

The design was inspired by an existing wordpress theme, namely Elegant Grunge by Michael Tyson. The coding was entirely done by me, with the help of this tutorial.
The pattern used in the background and header was found at Ming-Ling and was edited by my. The beautiful flower ornament was made by magimarie and the Kanji-brushes were downloaded from Obsidian Dawn.

This site is still hosted by the wonderful Jenny at The Whole Horizon .

gawariel.com‘s subtitle is The Mirror of my Fantasy, a quote from a song by Ayreon and it expresses exactly what this site means to me .

Previous Versions:

Version 1:

Hosted @ Googlepages (gawariel.googlepages.com)
Named “Imaginations from the other site” after a song by Blind Guardian

Version 2:

Hosted @ Googlepages (gawariel.googlepages.com)
Named “Imaginations from the other site” after a song by Blind Guardian

Version 3:

Hosted @ Freewebs (gawariel.webs.com)
Named “The mirror of my fantasy” after a song by Ayreon

Version 4:

Hosted @ Awardspace (gawariel.com)
Named “The mirror of my fantasy” after a song by Ayreon

version 5:

Hosted @ The Whole Horizon (gawariel.com)
Named “The mirror of my fantasy” after a song by Ayreon

The layout for this version was derived from the layout I created for my livejournal community gawariel_design.