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!!

The rebuild of I Built My Computer is up on the server. There are nine news feeds available including one on the homepage. There are two new galleries of cartoons. There is a joke of a joke page. There is left nav on each page. There are some new banners to look at in various places.

My hope is that some of the people that come to the site via Google image search will look around a bit more. We shall see, it could happen. Of course, the site could use a lot more articles. Those will come as the spirit moves me.

Check out what I have done and see if you can find something that doesn’t work. I did a fairly thorough test run this evening and I think that I caught everything, but more eyes are better for that sort of thing. If you find a problem just come back here and leave me a comment. Thanks.

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!

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.

I spent the day updating the home page for Number One Pictures. I  went with the three column layout that I have begun to use. On the left I put a QuickPic box to get to the galleries directly from the home page. I will use this format for any articles that I write. On the left I put the ubiquitous ad rotator, although I only have three ads in the rotation at the present time. I set my gallery QuickPic data in a php file so that I can include it on any pages easily.

I had been declined by a couple of camera shops so I appealed the rejections. I also signed up at a couple more affiliate sites. I want more ads in the rotation to keep things fresh. I don’t have enough in the music department either so I have applied for several more programs. I have over 70 programs that have declined my application and around 50 that are pending.

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!

My best performing website is Mixing Live Sound. I get steady search engine traffic to this site. The content is a bit limited at the present, but each time that I add an article I see a slight uptick in traffic to the site. This is a niche site for the live sound industry.

I went with my three column format. I moved the articles index to the left nav panel. On the right I put a box for random quick tips at the top with an ad rotator under the tips box. I dressed these boxes with a small border. I also moved most of the biographical information to an expanded ‘about us’ page. I am using different local nav items in the top and bottom nav bars. I have left the old front page on the server for a time. If you want to compare the old page to the new page follow those page links.

I have a goal to update many of the sites during my typically slow season. Of course, the priority for this is to update the better performing sites first, and then trickle down to the lesser sites. I have a notepad file in which I am keeping ideas for sites and improvements to sites. The list keeps getting longer as each idea seems to spawn a few more.