I have done a few things around the hosting space that I have not documented here. I added a comment box and reformatted the FreeBird Leather Sewing site. I also added blogs to three sites that are tied to an article distribution service. There are supposed to be articles added on a regular basis. The service does not work as well as I had hoped. There were a few articles added initially, but the follow up is slow to non-existent.

Yesterday I thought of using Gem Stones as a basis for web page backgrounds. I found several pictures of various Gems that were usable for the purpose. I made my usual symmetrical images. I finished the job this evening and uploaded the results to the Symmetrical Backgrounds site. Some of the backgrounds are very bright and happy and some of them are more subdued. All in all, the new gallery is a nice addition to the site. There are some backgrounds that would take very special pages and some that could be used more generally.

I finished work on my new background image gallery. It is one of the larger galleries on the site with 96 images. These are processed from images of fabrics that I found on the web. There is a wide diversity of fabrics represented in the gallery from lace to upholstery fabric. Some are quite happy and others are rather sedate.

I modified my gallery generating software for this site so that it produces pages using the background image for the page background. This duplicates the original pages that I built by hand in an instant. The only time consuming part of the process is preparing the images. Once the images are prepared, page generation and final processing and uploading is very fast.

It is always interesting to me to see the images in use as a background. Just seeing the image does not tell the whole story. When the images join to form a continuous background there is often quite an impact. Check out the new gallery on my Symmetrical Backgrounds site.

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.