The advantages of having full access!
For the last few weeks, we’ve been working on a design for a lovely blog site on multiply.com hosted by one of our online friends. She approached us and asked if we could alter a blog template to look a little more “dreamy”. The designing part of the task was easy enough: having been given a feather background and their site logo, we were inspired to create a banner that spoke “dreamy”, “inspiration”, and ”anime”. Now the hard part: implementing the design.
The site was mainly CSS based so we had no trouble in that area—since we’ve designed many of our own sites using CSS—but figuring out which styles referred to which part of the site was tiring. With no access to webpages it meant we couldn’t create our own CSS code and then use them on the pages; we had to go through each CSS file and search for the styles before adding it to the custom stylesheet they provided then altering it to suit our needs. But at least, at the end of it all, we managed to achieve the majority of our design concept—we’re actually quite pleased with the result—but as the word “majority” suggests, we didn’t manage to achieve everything we had hoped which was somewhat disappointing. For some reason, we just couldn’t change the colours of certain elements no matter what we tried.
So what did we learn from this experience? If one is fussy with the way things look (like we are), and if one can help it, it is always better to get yourself a domain or a webspace that allows full control over files. It’d save a whole lot of time and headaches when you reach the implementation stage.
Still, this was kinda fun. We always enjoy seeing the final result of a site design, and it turned out pretty good considering the constraints—we’re quite pleased with our efforts, our online friend was happy with our design concept, so we consider a job well done. 
) ). As for multiply.com blogs, we do think it is a good place to get a blog. Although it does take a while to find the CSS to achieve custom designs, the blog is in fact very customisable. So if anyone is thinking of getting a blog with multiply.com, don’t let your concerns over customisation stop you, because it is quite easily done (after some studying of the CSS).
Just in case you’re wondering, this is the link to the blog (template) we altered/designed for: http://animspiration.multiply.com/. It was originally orange with a grungy-themed banner. We’re not sure if the group accepts members outside KDU, but maybe sign up if you’re around that area, send them a guestbook message or something! It’s a university anime group who enjoys cosplaying and attending anime-related events. Sounds like fun!
Till next time!