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!

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 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.