There is a particular kind of software project where the hardest part is not writing new code.
It is finding the old code.
After modernizing the basic structure of Illyachan, I started digging further into the site’s history. Wayback Machine snapshots, old assets, archived HTML, forgotten CSS files. Anything that could tell me how the site used to look and behave.
And then something unexpected happened.
I found the corpse.
Not just screenshots.
Actual HTML.
Actual CSS.
Actual assets.
Enough pieces of the old website survived that rebuilding it stopped being a matter of recreating the design.
It became necromancy.
The Old Web Is Alive
The original Illyachan was very much a product of its time.
Glossy blue gradients. Rounded boxes. Anime artwork. Cloud backgrounds. Tiny navigation links. Sidebars full of widgets. Decorative elements everywhere.
Modern web design would probably call much of this unnecessary.
And that’s exactly why I like it.
The old site wasn’t trying to look like every other website.
It was trying to look like my website.
So rather than replacing the old design with another polished, minimalist theme, I decided to bring the old visual language back while keeping the underlying implementation modern.
The result is somewhere between a restoration and a resurrection.
The First Problem: The Logo
The modernized version initially had a much cleaner, more professional-looking logo.
It looked good.
It also looked completely wrong.
So I replaced it.
The old Illya-chan logo is back, with the wonderfully excessive pink-and-blue bubble lettering that younger me apparently thought was a perfectly reasonable thing to put on a personal website.
And you know what?
It fits.
The website immediately stopped looking like a generic modern blog and started looking like Illyachan again.
Sometimes the correct design decision is simply:
“Fuck professionalism.”
The Clouds Are Back
The original site didn’t just have a background.
It had an environment.
The content sat inside a centered panel while the surrounding page was filled with a giant illustrated sky.
That idea survived into the new version.
The difference is that modern CSS doesn’t require me to pretend everyone has the same monitor resolution I had when the original site was made.
The old artwork can now be adapted to different viewport sizes without stretching everything into oblivion.
So the visual idea remains intact:
Illyachan exists inside a sky.
And Then I Found the Other Stuff
The deeper I dug, the more ridiculous it became.
There were old page layouts.
Old navigation structures.
Old decorative elements.
Old 404 artwork.
And eventually I rediscovered another website I had made years ago, featuring a giant cherry-blossom landscape with animated petals and layered scenery.
I had completely forgotten how elaborate some of it was.
My first reaction was essentially:
“How the fuck did I make this?”
Apparently, younger me had decided that a website needed falling petals.
Not a background image of petals.
Actual moving petals.
And the scenery moved at different rates while scrolling.
Characters were integrated into the composition.
The page had depth.
It was completely unnecessary.
It was also fucking wonderful.
The Point of Modernizing It
This isn’t about making an old website look new.
It’s about taking an old idea and removing the technical limitations that surrounded it.
The old web gave me the freedom to make something weird.
Modern web technology gives me the tools to make that weirdness substantially more elaborate.
So the philosophy for the next version is simple:
Modern technology. Old-web soul.
Modern HTML.
Modern CSS.
Responsive layouts.
And then, sitting on top of all of that:
a ridiculous anime website with summer theme.
Because apparently that’s what I wanted to build all along.
Thank AnimeVisual for the old theme, I really liked it. Sadly, I cannot find their website anymore.
Necromancy Successful
The funny thing about resurrecting an old website is that you don’t just recover the website.
You recover a little piece of the person who made it.
And apparently that person really liked blue gradients, anime girls, clouds, cherry blossoms, and making websites unnecessarily complicated.
Twenty years of web development later, I can’t really argue with him.
He had a point.
Personal websites should be personal.
So Illyachan is alive again.
And this time, I’m not putting the corpse back in the grave.