Sandvox Website Profile: “Welcome to larryray.com”

My website covers a lifetime of great fun as a journalist, film maker, actor, world traveler, fine art gourd artist, translator for an Italian speleological web site, and topics including the early history of Aransas Pass, Texas, my year as a war correspondent in South Vietnam 1966-67, a visit on an adventure with "The Cronies," my work as production manager and actor in the classic Italian horror film, "The Beyond," and a link to my documentary shot in Holland dealing with the 1941 Nazi invasion of Amsterdam and the wholesale murder of Dutch Jews.

My site targets adults with interests in: the Vietnam War, Italian horror films, artists interested in fine art Gourd decoration, urban underground explorers, the "Sottosuolo" or underground of Naples Italy, Dutch Holocaust, WWII.

My Sandvox site was found by a French Cine Magazine publisher and researcher, Lionel Grenier, who interviewed me about my connection as actor and production manager on director, Lucio Fulci's 1980 classic film, "The Beyond," much of which was shot in New Orleans, LA. Lionel published the interview on his site in both English and French . . . and that interview was found by current owners of the film, Grindhouse Releasing, in Los Angeles who flew to So. Mississippi to film an interview with me in my home. The interview will join others made in Europe with Director Fulci before his death, and many of the cast and crew of this film. The interviews will be part of a Hi Definition 1080p BluRay DVD of their new totally digitally restored wide screen release of "The Beyond" which will be shown in midnight screenings in theaters in the USA and Europe to ever increasing cult fans and followers. It was a delight as an old guy to be "discovered" again, and all because of Karalia's fine layout and easily navigated web templates to showcase my content! Full details on the first link of my site, www.larryray.com
Many thanks!

Mac based, ease of use, migrated old content from my outdated MS Front Page site and Sandvox made fresh new design and layout a breeze . . . with no cascading style sheets to worry with, and html only if I choose to change or replace! As I mention below, the new Hydrogen template with its banner offered the flexibility to use advanced graphic design methods to create a very clean look.

The Hydrogen banner offered the possibility to create a very uncluttered, clean top of the home page. I designed a gray-scale gradient from mid range grey down to white, as a sized object which makes the header/banner dissolve right into the white page color. I used a Helvetica outline font with a 1pt dark gray stroke for the "Welcome to larryray.com" title as an object with transparent BG. The large B&W photo directly beneath the banner is from my time in Vietnam and easily pulls the eye down from the B&W banner. I am an early Photoshop user as well as years of working in InDesign, QuarkXPress desktop publishing, CorelDraw, and many other graphic design programs. Being retired, I quite honestly just did not feel like using Wordpress or Dreamweaver to migrate content from the old moldy Front Page site. So I looked around and found Karelia. If offered an Intuitive, quick learning curve and my little personal website, published with Sandvox, is full of widely varied content, yet is uncluttered, clean and very easy to visit and enjoy.