The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I have just completed testing of the update to Event Staff Online. The site seems to be working as planned. Well, I had forgotten to check in IE and did find one other little  thing when I just checked. Now the things that I checked are even working in good old IE. Swing by in your travels and tell me if you find something that is broken, even a little bit.

I added a few new pages and the comment system. I reformatted the existing pages and added some lines to some of them. I redid the site  nav so that one can get to any page on the site from any page. I think that it is now a much more friendly place to visit.

Check it out and tell me what you think!

The update for Event Staff Online is coming along. I have brought the existing pages up to the current state of my art. I have added a few new administrative pages. I am redoing some of the nav. I will be adding comment facilities on some of the pages.

The physical work takes time, but there is also time involved in thinking the changes out. The planning is important because I intend to promote the site a bit and visitors must be able to find their way around if there is to be value to the site.

I will be adding sidebar banners to this site. I need to choose banners that will complement the site, things in which my visitors may be interested. I have the code for the banner rotators in place, but I have to populate the banner pool.

With all the changes I will want to do some testing before I actually go live with the update. I have been doing that more recently, but I am also likely to make more radical changes with a site rebuild than I formerly would have done. I expect to complete the job tomorrow. I will play a bugle blast when it comes out of the gate. Stay tuned for the big excitement.

I thought that I really need to redo the landing page at Event Staff Online. This is a site that I put up primarily for my daughter and another event bartender, but it does have a few other listings. I need to make the landing page better at soliciting sign-ups if the site is to grow and be viable. I do get an amazing number of hits, some from people looking for event work and some through a few of the images that are posted on the site.

When I opened the page in my web editor I found that I have not updated this site recently. So this will turn into another site rebuild. There are not that many pages, but I will bring the site up to my current standard and add some functional things to try to enhance the performance of the site. This should keep me out of mischief for this evening. Hurry over and see if you catch the site before the update is uploaded. Hurry back to see what the updated site looks like.

The other big excitement around here has to do with the comment system script that I have been using. I have seen visitors to the site that searched by name, and now I have seen a bunch of visits from some one in Kiev Ukraine that is searching for a default line in the installations. These searches are hackers or comment spammers. I have seen a couple of instances of comment spam and I found through a search that there is a hack out there for the system. I am in the process of changing the default titles and lines so that eventually they will not show up in these searches. I will definitely change those things before any new installs.

This will take some time, if ever, before the search engines will stop returning those sites. The information is already indexed, and will keep showing up in searches even after the changes are made, at least until the indexes are updated. In the mean time I will keep my eye on things.

Well, back to the grind. Have a great day!

The aspirin that worked for the home page also worked for the info pages. It was an assigned width that gave IE the headache. Remove the assigned width and remove the headache. I had it in mind that IE wanted the width, but it turned out to be the other way around. Firefox doesn’t care either way, it can come up with the right answer without a problem and is just as happy without the assigned width and it all works. At this point The PC App Store looks the same in either browser. I like that.

I will be adding an introductory paragraph to the home page and to the directory pages, mainly for the benefit of the search engines. I may also adjust some of the page discriptions for the same reason. It would be nice if this site started paying its rent.

I found the main page problem that was causing IE-6 to have a headache. I had set a width and IE could not make it all add up. I have another site using the same format that worked in IE so I checked how I had gotten it to work there and found the problem. Now on to the support pages for the site. They also use the same format as the support pages on the other site and those pages work so I will look there for a hint. Maybe we can get by without some stronger pain reliever for IE.

I have been working on a major update to The PC App Store site. I have just uploaded the update to the server and it is now live. It may not display properly in older Internet Explorer Browsers (IE-6), but I will fuss with that soon and see if I can’t get that to work. The latest market share figure that I have seen for IE-6 is just over 10%, so I think that most people will see the site as I intend it to be.

Please leave a comment either here or on the site if you find something funky. I did put up the site at a test location and the pages that I tried after some tweaks all worked, but there are a lot of pages on the site, and I have not looked at all of them.

I put this site up about a year ago. It was little more than a banner farm. For the update I redid the home page and added a lot of content, both as additional offerings and as updates to the individual info pages. I redid the site navigation so that one can now get around the site. I also added comment boxes on the category directory pages. I may also add a comment box on the home page.

I do have a couple more catagories in mind to add to the site. Right now the most important thing is to promote the site a bit. There is small steady traffic to the site because of the quality of the name of the site. I must see if I can drive more organic traffic to this site.

Please stop by and take a look. Let me know what you think!

http://www.pcappstore.com/

The update to the site that I am working on is coming along slowly. This has turned into a major rebuild. I am making some changes to each of the files that were already in the folder as well as adding many new pages. The site was really a link farm, and I am trying to turn it into a friendly place. Watch for the unveiling in the near future. My goal is to complete the rebuild by the end of the weekend.

I have been tempted to put up the completed portion and then add the rest as I finish the work, but it will be much less confusing if I just do the complete job and then test it before it goes live. There are usually some small details that I miss in a rebuild of this type. It is better to test and catch the errors before the public has a chance to see them.

I will keep you informed of my progress.

Just so you won’t think that I have been sitting around twiddling my thumbs, I am in the process of doing a major rebuild of one of my sites. I will make an announcement with a link when I complete the job.

This is a site that gets a small amount of search engine traffic because of the domain name. It emphasizes the importance of the domain name. I have several sites with which I was lucky in the choice of a domain name. I also have one site that gets many visitors who are looking for something entirely different than I offer because of the domain name. The lesson here is to search for a domain name that is descriptive of what you intend to offer on the site. Keyword research should be done and a domain name that incorporates your keywords will go a long way towards making your site a success.