Website Updated
Thank you all for putting up with various odd goings-on for the past fortnight or so as we updated the site. We were doing so to improve the efficiency of the coding in the background, the clarity of the information in the foreground, and the general ease of navigation for the site as a whole.
For those of you with your own websites that may be interested in the changes made (and for those of you who want to know where to find stuff!), I’ve put together a quick list below.
- Site Navigation. The most obvious changes have occurred at the top of the screen, where the Navigation bar and the site Masthead are. To reduce the overall number of images that were being loaded, as that was causing a strain on older connections, the old Masthead background and upcoming show ads are now gone. I also removed the bar containing the social links to Facebook and Twitter. In order to keep those links visible, I re-designed the Navigation bar at the top of the screen to include ‘minor’ links as well as the big ones. The site logo was then moved to the middle to fill up the now empty Masthead, and I removed the post-number counter as I don’t believe anyone was paying any attention to it anyway! Overall, I’m quite happy with the final result – all the pertinent information is there, it’s still visually appealing, brand awareness is actually increased, and yet the whole page loads faster.
- Colour Scheme. The overall colour scheme used in the site was always fairly consistent. I’ve just made the odd tweak here and there – for instance, the headlines are now in the same dark shade of green as the top navigation bar and the site footer. As a general tip, I’ve found that using dark greys rather than flat black is much more pleasing to the eye as the overall font colour – but that’s a personal choice, I guess… I also reduced further the number of fonts used to three – although there might be a refugee somewhere! I’ve also gotten rid of the background images that had lent the old version its cream background and shadow effect. This was again to reduce loading times. The current shadow effect is achieved with code; Internet Explorer (as usual) can’t understand it, but I can live with that. All the other browsers show it just fine.
- The Site Footer. The site footer was largely just re-arranged, and the colour scheme was enforced more strongly. The current arrangement reads better however, and allows for more flexibility for changes in the future.
- The Front Page. The whole front page has been re-arranged. The biggest problems with the old design were twofold: a) The inclusion of posts’ large images and galleries directly on the fornt page meant disastrous loading times for poor connections, and b) giving all the recent news right on the front page meant that the majority of readers went no further into the site – there was no ‘click through’. Now that readers have to select to ‘Continue Reading’ in order to read a full post means that they are prepared to accept the accompanying images and galleries, and it means that I can track that activity. I can then see what posts are popular (i.e. that people wish to continue reading) and which are not. Two birds, one stone!
I also removed the old ‘Recent Posts’ section that had been at the bottom of the old front page. To keep image sizes low, the new main post is only 640px wide, leaving space to its right. That’s where I squeezed in the current ‘Recent Posts’ – although I removed the accompanying thumbnails (less images again!) and increased their number from three to four In an effort to increase reader’s awareness of any discussions going on, I used the rest of that space for the ‘Recent Comments’ section that had been down in the footer previously. I also included the beginning of each comment. Hopefully it will lead to more of the same. - The Pony Section. I had dealt with the pony section previously, and not many changes were required here. Any that have been made are generally in making the lists of ponies more aesthetically pleasing, including a logo where a thumbnail did not exist, and generally sprucing the place up a bit. The pony information itself needs a lot of updating, which hopefully we’ll get to once the winter sets in and Tom’s forthcoming book is published. This was the one area of the site where I didn’t skimp on images – the logic being that if readers were clicking through to learn about the ponies, then they would expect to see pictures! I also removed the ‘Ponies for Sale’ section and incorporated the ponies therein with the general pony categories (Young Stock, Broodmares, etc.). The thinking here was that not every pony that we were open for offers on was in the Ponies for Sale section, yet you couldn’t very well have them all under the one heading. Now people can see that they can contact us on any pony, not just a specific few.
- The Archives Section. The Archives section saw some changes also. The old list of posts-by-title was ridiculously long and had no order to it other than alphabetical, which wasn’t really of any use on its own. I have kept the list, but broken it down into monthly segments according to when the article was published. It’s a much more user-friendly way of doing things, I think, and had the advantage of doing away with the other old posts-by-month list entirely. As I will be including a visible list of Post Tags with each post, I expanded the old tag list to include all current tags. This still needs some work in the background to complete, as the most recent posts (say, the last month or so) haven’t been tagged at all. Also included is a navigation menu to help people find their way back to the main Archive once they begin searching for a post. This menu includes a link to a new page that lists nothing but the most recent 20 posts.
Another new feature to the Archives was the development of the Show Results category. This was a category like any other, it merely listed any posts that I had made that dealt with that subject matter. When it listed those posts however, the post titles may not have immediately suggested which show I was writing about. For example, the listing of the post “Village Linnet takes the Glory in 2010!” does not say explicitly where Village Linnet was so successful. So now, when the Show Results archive is called up, each post title includes a note underneath stating the show(s) being talked about. It wasn’t a life-or-death issue, but I think it helps people along. - The Resources Section The Resources section really needed very little done with it on the cosmetic level. There were some changes to keep things in line with the style of the rest of the site, but that was about it. Interestingly, this section doesn’t make it into the top ten most visited pages on the site, but is one of the top ten exit pages – suggesting that people initially tend to try and Google their way to the information they are looking for, but do avail of the links in the Resources section once they come across it…
- The Code. A huge amount of work has been done with the code, both in trimming superfluous code that was hanging around from earlier versions, and in updating the usable code to proper standards. Divs were tidied up, the style sheet was annihilated, lists were properly formatted, the whole nine yards. Some residual tidying remains to be taken care of, but the bulk of the work is done. There had been serious issues with Internet Explorer users, where that browser would freeze for anything up to four seconds on each and every page load in the site, but that has (hopefully!) been taken care of. The whole site should now be a leaner, meaner version of itself. Welcome to Version 4!
