The Hobby Webmaster Blog

This phase of the update to the AudioArt MusicPlayer site is on the server. I am listening to Magda Hiller as I write this post.

The music player, when opened in this way, opens in a pop-up window. I had to allow pop-ups for it to open automatically when opening the page. I have an emergency link on the page so that the player can be opened with a click if the pop-up is blocked.

Since the player is in a new window outside the normal browser it is possible to stop by the site and get the player and then go on to other things, either surfing the web or even another application. The player will continue to play until you close the pop-up window or the library is exhausted.

This update is a big step forward as far as usability for this site. I do have some further ideas to make the site more interesting to visit, but it does work much better than the original. Stop by and check it out!

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!

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/

I went live with an update to Here’s Our Site. There is an new look, although the same color scheme is present. There is also a new offer to sweeten the pot a bit. There is a lot of linking on the pages. I may have missed updating a link or two, if you find any broken links please let me know. There are comment boxes on most pages, so you could just leave a comment there.

I also finished the first two of the feeder sites, Artist’s WebSites and Band WebSites. I have several more of the feeder sites to go, but they only take a few minutes as they are primarily just a landing page that directs traffic to the main site. I want to get these out of the way so that I can proceed to other things.

Stay tuned for my further adventures!

I have just gone live with updates to my personal site, now called Wink’s Web Space and my business site at AudioArt Sound. There have been a few updates along the way so these are now in about the third major version.

I have learned a good bit about constructing websites in the last year. I put some of this into practice with this update. They were past due for a rebuild, although the rebuild was not as extensive as it could have been. I had already set the sites up with a css based layout for the 2.0 version of the sites. I had to go through and add some containers and rename others. There were some parts that I discarded.

This came about primarily because I had gone to blogging software on the AudioArt site. I set up the blog and liked the way that it looked, so I set out to make the rest of the site match. When I was finished with the business site the old personal site looked a bit dodgy, so I went ahead and did the rebuild to it, too.

These sites use php include files in several areas. Php does not work directly on a personal computer. I do have a server set up on my computer, but I decided to upload the sites to a temporary directory on the server for testing. Then when the sites were tested I just renamed the directory for the old site and then renamed the temporary directory with the site directory name. That is why the old sites are still available on the server if you know the address. I really do need to put a no index/no follow robots text file in those folders so that Google and others don’t get a headache.

My project yesterday was to do some minor touch-ups to Mixing Live Sound and Symmetrical Backgrounds, two of my sites that do see some visitors. I thought that they were going to be minor tweaks, at least. They both consumed far more time than I had anticipated.

The smaller job turned  out to be the Mixing Live site. I did find that I needed to make more adjustments than I had anticipated, but it was a relatively smooth ride. I must remind myself to actually visit some of the sites from time to time to see how they are actually working for my virtual world visitors. This all started out because I wanted to put a ‘book of the day’ rotator on the site. When I was checking that the new rotator was working I found some other things that were broken, so I fixed those as well. I think that the site is in good health now, but you can check and tell me if you find something that does not work.

With Symmetrical Backgrounds I decided to add an explanation of how to view the actual pages to the home page to try to engage more of my visitors. While the same instruction is repeated on the thumbnail pages it may be below the fold for most visitors. I decided to put it up front where more may notice it. I did that  and then I made another adjustment  that often helps with older IE browsers. This broke all the gallery pages. I loaded all of the gallery pages (around 560) into the text editor about three times to do find and replace searches. I uploaded the pages after each operation and then found other things that were broken. I also had a few pages that had plain vanilla backgrounds, this on a background image site, so I corrected those. Then there were several nav problems to work on. I think that I finally got it all squared away, but, as with Mixing Live,  you can check it out and tell me if you find something that I have missed.

I have figured out the plan for the Here’s Our Site family. I will offer to share revenue by giving people an ad block on their pages. I will give them space in the right column. This space is reported to work well with blog spaces and should work well for these sites as well. This, along with a site rebuild, may entice more people to take advantage of the offers there. I do get several visitors a month to this site and I think that the idea has potential, but it has never realized the potential as I expected. Of course, if too many people take me up on the offer I will have to work out some sort of automated system to put up the sites, but we will cross that bridge when we come to it. The Google calendars and comment systems should do a lot for these sites. This will be the first major update to these sites since I put them up over a year and a half ago.

Well, off to another battle!

The major update to the MC Rally site is complete unless you can find something that is broken. Well at least for the first level. I still intend to add the comment system to the picture pages in the galleries, and I need to do something about alt text for the pictures as the gallery generator does not put anything in there. That may be a major hand job. As with my other site rebuilds I took some of the boring stuff off of the first page and built some new pages for that boring stuff. At least now people have to go looking for it. I added the comment system to most of the pages and built several new pages. Of course that meant rebuilding and redesigning the nav sections. I added the left column nav section and put a gallery quick guide on the home page. It took a bit of head scratching to get that all to work as I wished but it finally got there. I learned a couple of things with this rebuild.

The css file for this site is quite long. I suspect that there are some spare parts in there somewhere. I may go through and clean a few of those out, but some of them may be in use someplace and I would not want to break things.

I have just looked at the page in IE-7 and see that IE can break a few things. It is not paying attention to at least one margin on the home page, but probably that is because it doesn’t add so well. The major problem is that it just flashes my header title for an instant and then hides it from the world. I may have to ask for a bit of direction on that one. Well I think that I will tweak things a bit more and see if I can get IE to behave.

The time has  come to knuckle down and get’er done with the MC Rally site update. I have been working on it some today. Mostly I have been looking at what it is that I have and deciding how it is that I want to present it. I did install the comment system and put a comment box up on Sam’s Page, my tribute page to Samantha Morgan aka: Morgan Storm. I intend to get a gallery index going on the home page, as the galleries are the biggest part of the site. I also want to add comment boxes with all of the pictures to try to engage some of my visitors. Of course, I will update the Rally list and even bring  some of it into the next decade. There are many decisions to be made as far as the presentation. I have the tools so that implementation will go relatively rapidly when the format and decisions are made.

Once the site is updated I will try to build the traffic up a bit. I do get a steady stream of traffic, but I am sure that with a bit of promotion I can improve that a good bit. These sites have been up for over a year and a half. I thought that the word might get around, but I am learning that traffic to a site does not just happen. There may be a rare instance where something goes viral but those times are few are far between. There are a number of free ways recommended to promote sites and I will be exploring some of those methods over the next few months.

I will let you know how this all works out and make a post when the update is complete.

I had done some preliminary work on the Mixing Live Sound site, primarily to the home page. I had put it into the new format and gotten some of my ramblings off of the page a couple of weeks ago. Now I have gone through the rest of the site and brought it up to the current spec.

I removed more ramblings from the front page and inserted a news feed from Pro Sound Web with industry news. I also found five other news feeds related to the industry and built the industry news area. I redid the nav top, bottom, and left column. I added the RSS feed meta tag so that the smarter browsers will display the RSS icon in the address bar. I added a links page and a site news page.

I will upload it this evening and test to see if I can find the things that I broke while fixing the site. I need more eyes for the testing, so stop on over and see if you can find something that does not work as expected.  Just leave a note in the Message Center or come back here and post a comment. Thanks!

The major upgrade/rebuild of my Number One Pictures site is on the server. I poked a round a bit and fixed the things that I found wrong. If you have time to look around a little see if you can find what I missed. If you do find something strange there, beside the pictures, come back here and leave a comment please.

The rebuild was basically from the ground up. The site looks the same as far as the backgrounds and outline are concerned, but all of the pages and a good bit of the back office stuff have been changed. I am displaying a photoblog feed on the front page that has some very nice pics. There are also five other feeds in the News and Reviews section of the site. The galleries have all been redone. The picture size has been slightly reduced, but there is direct nav to other galleries from every page.

The overall objectives of this round of rebuilds of my sites are to make the sites more interesting and easier to navigate. I have learned a lot since these sites were built and I am applying some of that education into the rebuilds. Much of what I am doing is to make updating the sites easier. Maybe the next round will change some design functions.

There is still a lot to be done on this  site and I have some ideas for other additions for the site. These things can be done more easily because they are not major projects. With the site rebuild out of the way I can take care of these other things as time permits. I do have several more sites that beg for attention, and there is a fairly good list of top level domain names that I could develop, and more bother me on a regular basis. I may do one or two when I am finished with my spring cleaning. I have a nearly complete concept for one of them on my local server.

Stay Tuned!!