Season 4 Site Design and how it came to be
Comments by Michael Conomy
AKA [Team Discoveror]

Note: This will not effect you, if you have not read any of the episodes, as it is mainly about the development of how I decided on the design from the season 4 site design

A lot of you of you that actually read Star Trek Dragon are probably thinking where the hell did this Mike Conomy or Team Discoveror come from and how the did he happen to get involved with the season 4 of this online Star Trek Series.

Some of you may know of me from MP [Millennium Pictures] or MCGI, both, which I am a major player. Well I wasn't always. Back in the year 1999 I was a nothing, knew pretty much nothing about fan fiction CGI or anything else that involved actually doing creative stuff on the computer. But I could fix a computer with my eyes closed and really enjoyed Star Trek and any Science Fiction.

Late 99 I picked up a copy of some dinky html program and tried to turn the idea I had for a show called Star Trek Discoveror, that never happened later on I got a copy of FrontPage 2000 and Photoshop 6 and it all started from there over the next year and a half I developed my design talent in both CGI  [through 3D Studio Max] and HTML by doing work for other people. I must of done close to 100 sites, including things that were never finished.

Now that brings us to somewhere in the beginning of 2001 I had given up on trying to create my own fan fiction series. Not due to my lack of talent as a web designer of 3D Artist but as a Writer. During this time I decided to work on a few other projects, such as the Star Trek Monet site and Star Trek Khitomer and others. But these were just one off thing. As one of these jobs was to be the new site for Star Trek Dragon, coming into its 4 season later on in the year. I really didn't think much of it as first; to me it was just another site design to improve my skills.

So I put forward a design to Jon, after he had asked if I was interested in working on the site, Jon was more then happy with it and so was I at that time. But the new season was still months of and I didn't have to do anything with the site.

Jon comes back to me a few months later and asked me how the new site was going; I said I hadn't really touched it since those early days. So I set out to start finishing it but after a while I noticed that I had developed my skills a lot more since then and the site was no longer up to my standards. So I started from scratch. I think it was after I showed Jon the newer site, he either asked me or I asked him if he would like me to be the Webmaster for the next season of Dragon. I thought about it for a few seconds. It would allow me to do the parts of a show i enjoyed with out having to actually write it, so I took the job and started to build the new episode banners [Which are on the site today] and the Character pictures, and as this was my first time doing actual character manipulations with actual actors heads I didn't know how well it would turn out. As it turned out they weren't so bad, Justin Shalk, writer of Star Trek Phantom and a Webmaster at MP with said and I quote "I haven't seen manipulations that good since paris2".

Then I did it again, I got involved with other projects my skills developed more and Jon came to me and asked how far I had got. I said not much further then I had shown you before. So I sat down to finish the site and then all of a sudden I noticed the site was a piece of junk compared to what I could do now. I thought to my self I have to stop doing this or otherwise I will never finish the site. So I started looking around the net for a site that would push my talent to recreate the look of. This site was Deep Angel, an online Series that was also creating its own game. I had been to that site about 50 million times but never knew how to work out the design to work until a friend of mine Pete Tzinski asked me to try and show him how to pull of the design for a design he wanted. So I sat there for a few hours and worked it out, I then showed Pete how to do it but he was still a decent way behind me in knowing to do certain things in HTML and in Photoshop.

I ended up taking the things I had just learnt and made the Star Trek Dragon site you see to day, it is a site I am still happy with even 3 months after I finished it, and I have done no other sites that out do it in HTML coding since then. Also since there are no frames, its all in tables, I had to spend many hours placing tables inside tables and also placing links on almost every page.

Jon has asked me once or twice weather I would be willing to stay on for a season 5 if he decides to go into Dragons 5 season. My response at this moment is, HOW THE HELL DO I TOP THIS !!!.

laterz
TD

Note: You can contact me about any of the graphics or HTML workings at td@mcgi.com