With the Symmetrical Backgrounds rebuild out of the way I am proceeding to the next project. I have begun working on the update/rebuild of I Built My Computer. ‘I Built’ is a computer as a hobby/information site.

I am rebuilding it to improve the navigation and highlight the advantages of the site. Most of my search traffic for this site comes from google images because of a cartoon that I have posted there. I want to make it known to my visitors that there is more to the site than the one cartoon.

I will be improving the navigation, adding some articles, and trying another trick or two to see if I can get a few of the visitors to stick a little bit. I think that the site has some potential, but most of it is not realized as yet. Since I am doing a major rebuild I will do it like the background site rebuild. I will prepare the new site and test on the local test server, and then upload the whole new site. I am changing the look of this one slightly as well.

Some of the changes that I am making to these sites are in the back office. They are not seen by the visitors and do not affect the way that the site operates. The sites are just more logically laid out internally as well as outwardly and I am trying to standardize things so that when I work on various sites the same tools will be available in the same places. I will probably continue this trend with the next update to the sites as I put more new procedures into practice. In the long run I suspect this will be a great help.

The renovation project is officially up on the web. I uploaded the new site last evening. I have used the random rotator script to change the background on the home page and included a link to reload the page. I also put all of the images into galleries and give direct access to the thumb pages from the home page.

The galleries provide several advantages. The old index pages were very long and took a lot of scrolling. The thumbnail pages are fairly short with minimal scrolling. They also load much faster that the old pages that used full size images. I have modifies my gallery software to produce the pages using the presented image as the page background. The gallery software generates the pages – pronto!!

There were almost two thousand files to upload with this rebuild. I deleted the old site completely and uploaded the new site. Even with the higher speed Internet connection it took several minutes. I did upload a folder needlessly that was much bigger than I needed to upload, so that took up a third to half of the total time spent in the upload.

Everything that I checked is working fine. I had done some testing on my local server installation, so I had most of the bugs squashed before I uploaded the site. If you can find something that doesn’t work right please let me know. You can find the site at: http://www.symmetricalbackgrounds.com/

The update to Symmetrical Backgrounds is proceeding apace. I have moved (locally) all the older images into the gallery format. The landing page has the gallery index as a tickler. There is one thumb from each gallery and a description of the images in the gallery in the center column. The thumb links to the index page for the gallery and I will probably add a ‘See the Gallery’ text link as well.

The original index pages for the various classes of images were very large. One advantage of using the gallery generator is that there are small file size thumbnails of each image. This will allow the index page to load much faster. There is also much less scrolling necessary to view the thumbs. All of the image pages are smaller, too, so the whole site should operate faster. People don’t like to wait for pages to load, although with expanding broadband usage this is less of a problem.

I still have to make some decisions and redo the menus. I am adding some banners, so at least a few must be selected. Then it will be on to the testing phase. I will test locally on my installation of xampp before I put this update on the web. It is a major rebuild of the site, and I am bound to have forgotten something somewhere.

If all goes well I may be able to upload the new site tonight. Of course, I will announce the event on this page, so subscribe to the RSS feed so that you will be advised when the event takes place!

I am in the process of updating many of my sites. I suspect that my natural tendency to explain about my sites on the home page has not helped in keeping visitors on the site. With my updates I am attempting to engage the visitor as soon as they land on the home page. I am moving almost all of the boring details to various boring detail pages for the insomniacs of the world (or those truly interested in details).

I am also attempting to make the site navigation more user friendly. I am installing a left nav box and trying to populate it with the things that the visitor will want to access. On some sites this will vary depending on the section, but I am using php includes so it will be relatively easy to make changes down the road.

I have completed the rebuild of the Web Pickups site using this philosophy and am now working on my background image site, Symmetrical Backgrounds. With Symmetrical Backgrounds I get some search traffic, but it does not stick as well as it might. With Web Pickups much of the traffic is deep linked but in the past people had to look around to find anything else of interest to them. By making the nav more intuitive I hope to hold the traffic that I do get a bit better.

The results will take a while to manifest, but I will be watching my traffic reports for indications that the design philosophy is working. My money is on the fact that it will work but only time will tell. You can check out Web PickUps (a comedy site) now and keep your eye out for the grand unveiling of the new Symmetrical Backgrounds (a web page background image site). If you check SB now and then keep your eye on it you will have no problem knowing when the update is on the web.

Post a comment to tell me what you think of the new designs. Please let me know if you find something that doesn’t work. There are a lot of pages on both of these sites (hundreds – not thousands) so getting all the linking right is a feat in itself. Thanks!

I have had a page up for some time that should be a fun place. It is still waiting for the first clod. (When I was a kid clod fights were a big thing.)

This is supposed to be a fun site. It is basically a bulletin board for people to get things off their chest. The idea comes from the Post Secret site.

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people
mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.

With Post Secret people make a post card with their personal secret and send it in. Some or all are posted weekly to the page. The site has new material every Sunday and there are several books featuring the postcards that they have received.

The site that I hope may become the web based equivalent is Leave Some Dirt. I am mentioning this because as I checked my traffic for today I noticed that someone had visited. I went to check if they had thrown the first clod. I like the site design that I did for the site. I feel that it has the right combination of happy and somber for its intended purpose.

I invite you to visit Leave Some Dirt. I am still waiting for the first clod to be thrown!!

With the Web Pickups update/upgrade fairly well in hand it is time to move on to the next major project. Symmetrical Backgrounds is one of my sites that attracts more visitors. I intend to redesign the site to be a bit more exciting and more user friendly. I have some basic ideas in mind and have even done some testing on my local server.

There will be a good bit of work to this rebuild as well. I started making pages manually back in the beginning. This made a good display, but I tend to put up fairly large groups of images when I update the site. Manually building pages was a disincentive to adding new content in the form of background images.

I have a photo editor package that came with a gallery generator. I had made an edit to the template pages some time ago to allow for an external style sheet. This allowed me to use the generator to make galleries that fit cosmetically with my various sites. This worked well, so I began thinking of a way to use it for my background image site. I looked over what calls did what and concluded that  I could modify the package to generate pages using the background image for the page background. The resulting galleries have much the look and feel of the pages I made manually, but a new gallery goes up in minutes instead of hours.

As part of this update I intend to replace the old pages with my gallery generated pages. As in my other sites, I intend to put most of the boring details from the current home page into sub-pages. The home page will get right to the business of displaying my real content and the site should be much more user friendly. I may leave the old site structure basically in tact so as not to frustrate the search spiders too much and overlay the updated site, we shall see. I will keep you up to date on the progress with posts here, and as soon as the update is ready for prime time I will let you know. I may offer a few previews along the way as well.

The major work on the redesign of my site, Web Pickups, is now complete. The site is re-engineered from top to bottom. The colors and look are still the same, but the functionality, I hope, is vastly improved. Please stop by and let me know how much you like it.

I had put the original site up last year. I have had many visitors that got to the home page and then left the site. I had too many potatoes and not enough meat there, I think. I moved the potatoes off of the home page and filled the void with meat. I hope that my guests dine well.

I added a mission statement page and an contact page, putting in them most of the boring administrative stuff that I had on the main page. I also redid the bottom nav to be more in line with web usage than before. I had previously just repeated the top nav at the bottom. In place of the old content I placed a sample video, joke, and picture in random rotators. The page will appear different each time that it is loaded. There is now a left nav box that, on the front page, shows the latest additions and a random thought/quote. On deeper pages the left nav box is used for the section index. I had my latest additions as an addendum to the top nav bar before. I am sure that the site is much easier to get navigate now, and the home page gets right to business.

I am very interested in your comments on the redesign. Please check out Web Pickups, and then come back and leave me a comment. Thanks!

News Flash!! Blogs work. I had a visitor to this blog last evening. When I checked my web traffic this morning I found that the visitor had found my blog because of a comment and tag about the Alexia Toolbar. This is at least the second time that I have seen that a visitor had arrived from a search engine while using the alexia toolbar as a search term. I was curious so I put ‘alexia toolbar’ into the google search box in FireFox, my preferred web browser. The Hobby Webmaster article was in the number two spot for that particular search result.

Lessons learned??

• The content and tags of your posts get indexed. The tags are important, try to use keywords in your tags that might come up as search terms (as long as they relate to content in the post.
• Keep on posting! Topics that you find interesting will probably be of interest to others.
• More, and varied, content will attract more searchers, and possibly build your reader base.
• There is also a statistical chance that an AdSense box in the side bar is effective. I have two AdSense units on the blog, one in the sidebar and one at the bottom of the page. I got a click on one of these, and though I don’t have analytics set up to track which ad unit a click came through I suspect that the sidebar unit resulted in the click. It is visible for a longer peroid of time while a visitor is reading through the posts.

There are probably more things to be learned. These are things that are immediately called to mind.

The new Web Pickups is taking shape. I made the decision on how to handle the pictures pages and proceeded with the process. I have one more minor addition to the pages, but that one should go smooth. I also have assigned myself one more task for the home page. It is a minor improvement but will take some time to implement.

Speaking of time, this update has been more time consuming than I had expected or hoped. There are probably almost 400 pages on this site. I have done much of the work with the ‘find and replace’ function of my text editor, but there were some minor differences on some of the pages that prevented this from being 100% successful. I have had to open each page in my html editor and check for errors. I think that I have found them all. I also found that I did not have a local copy of a half dozen pages and a few images. I will probably have over 20 hours into this update project.

The good news is that all that I have accomplished is uploaded and ready to greet my visitors. I have found the site much easier to navigate in my testing. When I put the finishing touches on the update I will probably bother my email list with the news. You can go now and check the progress at the New Web Pickups site.

In my ongoing update to Web Pickups I ran into an unusual problem with Internet Explorer. I was hindered a small amount because the problem seemed to be associated with an ‘overflow: auto;’ styling that I had used in an index box, and IE is known to go its own way with the overflow auto implementation. I did some research on the web but the research raised more questions than it answered. I found no instance where my specific problem was addressed. The information that I found also indicated that the problem was alleviated in IE-7, but I was seeing the problem in both 6 and 7.

The problem was that everything on the page was dumped into my auto-scrolling list box, even though it displayed as intended in FireFox. Furthermore, the same code worked on other pages where the index file was not used. This list is a very long list with around 120 links to other pages. I had found that if I removed the overflow auto the page would display more or less correctly. Finally I isolated the problem to my list.

I had just converted it to an unordered list and have not used that in the past, even though it is more correct than the way that I have done it in the past. I though that perhaps it was something to do with IE’s handling of unordered lists, so I was going to convert it pack to a simple series with <p> tags. I deleted the opening <ul> tag and then went to delete the closing ul tag. When I got there, something didn’t look right. FireFox forgave the error, but IE in both flavors became extremely confused. When I looked at the tag I saw </ul – I had forgotten the closing caret (>). The tag should have looked like </ul>.

I added the missing caret to the code and IE said, “Oh, That’s what you mean!!”. When I uploaded the file with the missing caret IE got so happy that it did its best to render the page in the way that I wanted. I spent several hours chasing the problem of the missing caret!!

For all you readers that are following this adventure, you can now see the progress of the update live at the Web Pickups site. I still have more Ideas and more work to do, but what I have done so far is up and running. I know that there are a few of the video display pages that have a problem. If you run across one of them please let me know either through email or leaving a comment here. Thanks!!