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!

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.

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!!

I am working on a major update to my site Web Pickups. I have the new home page up but not all modules are working (no content). The new home page will be much cleaner and present some real content instead of my mission statement that has greeted visitors up until this time. I will relegate that to an About Web Pickups page. Anyone that is interested in that sort of thing can go digging for it.

I am also moving the latest additions to a nav box on the left. I have ‘a thought for you’ quotations in a rotator in the box below the latest additions. On the right I have an advertising banner (along with my Google AdSense in the header). Center page has a picture (random rotator) and below that is a random movie.

I will keep my laundry list indexes for the sections, but I will also put the list into a nav box. On the movie pages it will be in a box to the left in my standard layout. On the pictures pages I may put it and the commercial message below the images. I am serving some fairly large images so I don’t want to limit my options as to image size.

The new home page is up on the site if you want to check it out. It will be there until I post the announcement here that it has gone live. You can follow the progress as I add the various rotator targets. I suspect that this layout will work much better than the old one.

I have most of my skinning figured out for the WordPress blogging software I think. I will put up one more blog as a test and if all goes well I will put up a few more. If  I am where I think I am, installing a new blog on one of my sites will be quick and easy. I will let you know via post here if and when new blogs are installed (so attach to my post RSS feed).

The blogging software automatically notifies one of the blog indexes when there is a new post. Anybody that keeps an eye on this index can tell that there is a new post. I suspect much of the key to picking up new traffic from the index depends on catchy names both for the blog and for the posts. I have seen some traffic to this blog that I suspect is the result of listings on this index. The software also generates a notification by RSS feed when there is a new post.

Most people that are driven to put up a website hope to see some traffic to the site. The best traffic is the ‘free’ traffic. Blogging is one of several free options. The best free traffic is the search engine traffic. The path to search engine traffic is quality unique content. Blogs, for the most part, by their nature have unique content. Search engines are able to index the content in the blog so this should generate some traffic to the site.

I played with the rotator script in conjunction with my home page background image. It is now working very smoothly. I will probably put it up even before I do the full update to the site. I may change the header image or put another rotator in there, although there would be no way to control what color combinations showed up (unless I made partial internal style sheets, food for thought!!).

In other news, a question on the KompoZer forum started me thinking about other keyboard shortcuts. I have never been a big word processor user, so some of the tricks of the trade are foreign to me. There are a lot of things that can be done with the alt key plus a letter key. Keyboard shortcuts are a great time saver because you don’t keep switching between the keyboard and the mouse. Those that were into computers early on were used to using the keyboard for navigation as it took them a while to harness the mouse. Word processor users are often used to keyboard shortcuts, too. Us in the general population are often very mouse oriented. Learning and using keyboard shortcuts can be a great time saver if you are inputting a lot of data with the keyboard. ‘Copy’ and ‘Paste’ operations are also available on the keyboard as well as ‘save’.

I have two WordPress Blogs at the present time. I am planning at least a couple more in the near future, but these two are serving for the time being.

WordPress has come out with a major update to the software. It has been available for a few days. I hesitated running the updates for a bit, because I did not know how the update would sit with my few visual changes. There was no problem. It has now occurred to me that there was even less problem than with some smaller updates that I did previously. Those involved changes to the css file so required editing of the css file to get back to my personal normal. With this update I just uploaded my header and footer files and my image folder and there is no visual change to the blogs.

There is a new control panel for the backend of the blogs. This seems to be  quite user friendly. The positions of some of the utility blocks has changed, but all the stuff that I use is there and readily available. I am a relative new user of this software, so I am not set in my ways and the transisition will be no problem.

I do still plan on putting up a couple of blogs. I had been working with a theme that is not yet listed on the WordPress site as being compatible, but I suspect that there will be no problem with it. I think that there has been noone that reported on that particular theme. Time will tell!

I have been working on the new home page for one of my sites. There are eight boxes with randomly changeable content. There is the potential for each of the boxes to change each time that the page is loaded. I have now populated the files for each of the boxes so that none of them come up blank (usually). I will upload a bunch of stuff to the site and do some testing online. Then, if everything works, I will go live with the new page. I will post again with the link as soon as the ‘new’ page is live.

There is now content in five of the eight boxes on the home page (on my local server only). I made a very minor error in one of the text files and that box loaded only intermittently. I looked at the file and say the error immediately. I had added a separator after the last entry. That appears to be something that can confuse the poor script, but I guess that it was really just loading the blank space after the divider. I also had to isolate my label from the script because I had used a few smaller banners and they would push some of the headings out of the way. I had wondered about that. It is all doing what it is designed to do on the local server. It will be interesting to put it up live. I might have done that this evening, but a job came up at the last minute, so once again, work is interfering with my hobby.