I have embarked on a journey. The trip is to rebuild my business website, AudioArt Sound. It is too soon to check the progress at this point, but I will post an announcement when the journey ends. Right now the new pages only reside on my computer, but you can look at the AudioArt Blog to see the new site design.

This was one of my original sites. At first it resided on my free ISP web space. I was not very knowledgeable when I first built the site and did most things wrong. I gained some knowledge and rebuilt the site one time and moved it to the paid hosting space. I have progressed some in my capabilities, and so I will soon unveil AudioArt Sound 3.0.

In many ways it is more work to rebuild/upgrade one of the old sites than it is to slam up a new site. With a new site I make the pages to my current standards and skill level. When I redo one of the old sites I have all the old mistakes to correct and I must maintain the linking framework through the transition. With a new site there is a straight forward process. I do this and then I do that, and soon the site is live. With a rebuild I have to think of how I can make things better. This site and the personal website, Wink Longnecker.com, are the only two sites that do not use my basic wire-frame layout. This  makes this rebuild even more interesting. I will also want to improve some functions as I make these changes.  All of this takes a bit of head scratching. I will get the task finished at some point, but it will have to be a spare time project, so it may take a while.

I have begun an update of The Closet Online. I will be adding some catalog pages. Then I will be trying to direct some traffic there. The catalog that I am putting up now is a custom jeweler. I am thinking of putting up a Squidoo lens to direct some traffic there, and maybe a hub page as well. I may also try a few articles.

I have a lot of studying to do, and a lot of work. I need to start generating some income from the sites. This becomes a job if one is to derive the benefit. I will drop some links here when I go live with the update. Subscribe to the RSS feed so that you can keep informed.

I have initiated a new blog in conjunction with the Mixer in a Box site. The blog details the gigs that I do with the Software Audio Console. I have one more show to log to bring the blog up to date. Adding the blog creates an RSS feed in conjunction with the site, and blog posts are indexed by the search engines. I just added the nav links to the Mixer in a Box site today. I also worked on the blog page to give it the Mixer in a Box family look. I have a bit more to do to complete that project as I am using a white background for the title section of the header block that I have not yet incorporated into the design. Working with the blog template is not as straight forward as working with a straight page.

I have begun an update to the AudioArt sound site. I had put up a blog over the winter and used a different design for the blog. I thought that it looked good, so I have begun updating the old site to match the blog. I did not use my standard parts in the original design, so the update is not just a matter of changing the css file. It will be a bit of work this time, but then if I choose to change a skin it will only be a matter of updating a couple of files. I am doing some redesign as well as the cosmetic changes. This should make site navigation a bit easier. Overall I think that this will be a step in the right direction. If you want a preview just go to AudioArt Sound.

I was adding some pages to the new site today. It is best practice to use an unordered list for menu items. I had done that for vertical menus but not for horizontal menus. I thought that since I was making some changes that I should learn how this was done. I have not used unordered lists much, but I had a good idea of what needed to be done. I changed the list display to inline and sure enough, the menu displayed almost right. The only problem was that the unordered list introduces an indent, and this was causing the centered display to be not quite centered. I did a web search and found a solution without any problem.

The same solution will help with the display of my vertical menus. I had tried a negative margin to correct for the indent. This worked fine in FireFox, but I forgot to check it in Internet Explorer. Someone pointed out to me that the menu was cut off in IE. I have not tried the fix yet, but I think that it will take care of my display problem with my vertical nav sections, too.

I have just updated several blogs using the new built-in update procedure in WordPress 2.7. This is a very simple process if you are not using either of the themes that come with the WordPress package, or if you have made no modifications to the original files. My first two blogs that I put up were using the default theme, and I had made  some personalization’s to them. When WordPress does an update they replace all the files in the themes that are included with the software.

For all my later blogs I had gone to a free third party theme. This theme makes it easy to maintain my site background and looks. WordPress does not mess with those files, so it is just a matter of one quick click from within the admin area of the blog and the update is accomplished. I went ahead and added the third party theme to the earlier blogs so that future updates will be more straight forward.

I have been working more on the site upgrade for Number One Pictures. I had put my gallery index with thumbnails into the left column nav and used a php include so that updating would be minimal. But there was still the galleries index page with the same data in a different format. Wouldn’t it be nice to use one data set and include it in both places?

It turns out that just this sort of thing is possible with css. I have been aware of special rules in css for several months (I have only used css in web design for a bit over a year). I had used them for a couple of minor things. Since I am doing a major rebuild of the site it seemed that it was time to delve into the matter a bit deeper.

I set up a test page on which I have the two areas side by side. I placed and named my test containers. I then proceeded to apply the special rules, and sure enough, the same data set can be formatted so that it works in both locations without any problem. This means that I can have one file that can be included in either place and display the way that I want it to in either format. It will save time when I add more galleries to the site.

I am following my plan for the rebuilds on these sites. I am taking my long winded ramblings off the home page. They are still there if anybody cares to go looking for them, but the new home pages are getting right to business. I will have an introductory paragraph and a news feed on the home page. There will be (and I had done this a few weeks ago) a scrollable galleries index with thumbnails in the left nav column as well as the articles index. There is more advertising on all the sites in the form of affiliate banners mostly in a right column.

There is still a good bit of work to do on this one before I upload it to the server. I have to rebuild all of the galleries to match the new format. Luckily, the gallery software and some auxiliary software do most of this. I do have to re-edit the html templates that the software uses. There will be a bit of time involved, but I will keep you informed.

I got distracted from my rebuild of the I Built My Computer site. There were two things that distracted me in addition to my real business. The first was learning how to display a news feed on my sites. The second, also a result of the first, was that I worked on the Number One Pictures site rebuild to include several camera news and reviews feeds.

I mentioned the feeds that I have put up in the previous post, so I don’t need to reiterate here. For most of the feeds locating appropriate material takes a bit of time. There are many feeds available. The all have to be checked to see if they will display with my online reader. I also need to check the content to see if it is right for the site on which I am placing the reader. The content for the I Built site was the easiest. I have a folder full of Tech News sites because I have long been interested in computer tech. Nearly all of them have a feed, and all but one of the feeds that I tried worked in the reader.

I had checked for Camera and Photography News and Reviews to put up on the gallery site. There were several good options readily available. I had done some preliminary improvement to the site, but incorporating the news feeds means that the full rebuild should take priority. This is a much bigger undertaking than the rebuild of I Built because of all the galleries presented there. I spent much more time working on it than the rest of the rebuild on I Built will take, and it is still not finished.

I will now complete the rebuild of I Built and then get back to the work on Number One. I hope to upload the new I Built site this evening and the new Number One site by the weekend. Of course, I will trumpet these events here, so subscribe to the posts RSS feed to keep up with my latest adventures!!

I am still working on the rebuild of I Built My Computer. It is not really that big of a task, I just was distracted by earning a living last week. Most of my real business for the month of January took place last week. The first week in February will also be a busy one.

In addition, I learned how to call an XML feed and display it on a web page using a php script last evening. Using the php script brings dynamic content to your page. It is searchable and indexable by the search engine spiders. This means that you have new content on the page whenever the spider, or a visitor, stops by. From the search engine standpoint, there is more and new content to index. It is suspected that the spiders will visit the page more frequently because of the frequent change. If they visit more frequently they are likely to tell more people to come and visit.

I think that I will put a feed box from this blog on the personal home page. I found a good motorcycle related feed for the Rally site. Tech feeds are no problem for the computer and software related sites. I will look for a feed, preferably a review feed, for the Gallery site. I have several ideas of what I would like to find for the various sites.

I have learned already that I have to check for the quality of the feed before putting a page on a site. I established a directory on my web space to use for that purpose. The address for the feed goes in an include file, so upload is minimal. I copied the page a couple of times with other names and a different include file, so I can test three feeds at a time. I was hoping to have multiple feeds on a page, but the script that I am using complains about that, so I will probably use a page per feed for now. It is easy to do, because the pages can be copies with only one small change for the name of the include file. The include files can also be copies with the exception of the feed url.

I did find a site that was selling a script to do this. The customer reviews indicated that the search traffic to their sites doubled or tripled when they added the dynamic content. That software may have some bells and whistles that my barebones script does not have, but the major benefit comes from having the dynamic content.

In other news, the preliminary indication is that the rebuild to Symmetrical Backgrounds and Web Pickups are having an effect on the number of pages viewed per visit. There is really not sufficient data yet to call it a trend, but there are some indications that what I have done is helping.

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.