The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I have been working for a couple of days on a face lift for the old Pennies for Wink site. I have just uploaded and tested the first phase of this face lift. There is a new look, I hope a bit more interesting, to the home page. I added several catalog pages and a directory to those pages, as well as left nav access to the pages. I redid my top and bottom navigation bars as well and added some pages that are long overdue.

I still need a ton of content for this site. I have an articles section that is completely unpopulated. I will write some articles and look for some good, relevant ones to reprint. I do see search engine traffic to some of the reprint articles on the Mixing Live Sound site. Original content is much to be preferred, but I am not always inspired to write. Of course, the site will need some promotion as well as content if there is to be any significant amount of traffic.

The domain name is not one that will be easy to promote. There needs to be some focus for a website and it is best if the domain name contains a keyword that is related to the site theme. I purchased this domain name before I became aware of how things work. I do have a few good domain names, more by accident than design. It would be nice if I could get this site to work well enough to pay its rent, at least. The education is worth something.

So, stop by the site and check out the changes. Leave me a comment or a suggestion as to the progress or direction that the site should go. There are comment boxes on the pages and there is a blog associated with the site. I have installed the KeywordLuv plug-in along with a do follow plug-in. There is a post about the update there. You could leave your comment on the main site or go to the blog to leave your comment.

I have made a music player available to visitors of Mixing Live Sound. The technical aspect is taken care of, but I will add more content and variety to the player. I want to add a page explaining the player and the music a bit more. I will also be adding a video section in this round of expansion of the site.

This was a very good exercise. I had, at some point, figured out how to open a player directly with a link and then forgot how I had done this. On my AudioArt MusicPlayer site it takes too many clicks to open a player. With this experience as well as observations and added experience perhaps I can now make that site work more in the way that I originally wanted it to work.

The videos page/pages are no problem. I am using YouTube videos on several sites. I even have four videos up on YouTube myself (I hope the link works, I have not tried this before). Last year I considered buying a video camera, but the ones that I liked were out of the budget for my intended purposes. I have not been big into videos, although I did have a nice 8mm camera and projector at one time. Video on the consumer level has come a very long way since that time.

Getting good relative content for the video pages will be the biggest problem. I have a couple of mine and the two SAC videos that I will feature and maybe find a few more. I will call for recommendations through the comment system, as well.

Well, I had better leave you now and go fuss with the sites. Stop by and check out the changes if you get the chance.

I did a minor update to Mixing Live Sound. This was just cleaning up the code a bit on the existing pages. I do have some new pages in the planning stage and I want to redo the home page.

I am thinking of adding a YouTube music related videos page. I have a couple of my own videos and can find many that are much better. These might make the pages a bit more sticky. I am also thinking of adding a music player page to the site since it is about sound. I have considered adding a blog to the site to post quick tips and blurbs that are too short to make a real article page. A blog is quick and easy and one can post from anywhere that there is a computer and an Internet connection.

I have several article ideas on my to do list as well. I do have many visitors that read the articles, so more content for the site will make it a more interesting place to visit.

Mixing Live Sound is a niche site for the live sound mixing business. There is a good deal of interest in the subject matter from the local band level. People that do their own sound and want to do a better job are the primary audience at the present time, I suspect. For the specialized terms I get first or second page position in the search engines. I have even seen a #1 in Yahoo search results. I get visitors to this site from around the globe.

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!

Between my reading on the subject of SEO and some comments on a forum that I frequent, I came to the conclusion that using an h1 tag for the site name is a waste of a good semantic tag in most cases. The  dilemma being that the site name is too generic and will likely not apply equally and relevantly to all pages. In further reading I ran across an author that felt the same about the semantical use of the h1 tag. From a semantical standpoint it would seem that the h1 tag should more closely align with the page title than the site name.

I had considered dumping the site name into a ‘p’ tag and making some conditional styling statements for a paragraph in the header block. This is easy to implement and seems to work fine. The other author thought of putting the site name in a div with an innovative id like site_name, and applying the styling to the div. This may be a better approach as there is indication in the code as to the purpose of the content of the div.

I had written an article for Selling on Your Website about HTML Semantics, so I implemented the change to the site_name div first on that site. I will probably go through and change this on some other sites now. On some of my sites I will wait for the regular update cycle to make the change. Any new sites will probably follow the new program. I will be watching my traffic analytics to see if I can identify any change in the traffic pattern that could be attributed to the change in philosophy.

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!

I did a few further tweaks to the World SoapBox site last evening. I had recently added comment boxes to the rant pages. I worked on site navigation a bit more last evening. I will soon break the Navigation down further by category and by author. I will probably change some of the color scheme as well. I want to make it look a little more serious. I do need rants for the site. There are a couple of categories that are completely unpopulated at the present time, and all categories need more rants. Please submit a rant at your earliest convenience!

I am thinking that this site may also be a good place to host a forum. The comment boxes allow for comments on the articles, but a forum would promote discussion on the various topics of the articles. Do you think that a forum on the World SoapBox site would be a good thing? Leave me a comment on this blog. Thanks!