Evolution of a Web Site

Webmaster in Japan Blog

2006-05-20T05:46:00.000-07:00

My spin-off blog from this covering my life in Japan has been very successful. Like there are about the same number of normal comments as posts. I use the Akismet spam filter to automatically weed out the bad comments. On this blog I have posted alot of very interesting photos. This actually makes it hard to publish a blog since I have to edit the photos for the web i.e. select the best part of a photo, reduce the picture size and trim the resolution to preserve quality yet maximise the download speed of the image.

The end result though, is a blog which really amazes people and intrigues them. So it's worth the effort.

Blog Traffic Reports and get Search Engine Listing

2006-01-02T10:38:00.000-08:00

So I can get blog traffic reports and get search engine listing for my blog I decided to move to blog.urgentclick.com

Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Customize Blog Template

2005-12-30T14:00:00.000-08:00

Look at my cool new blog page design. I made my blog template look like my web site.

To do this I saved the source code of the blog page and tweaked the style settings offline.

Finally I copied and pasted the code in the Blog Template modification area. Now my blog has my logo in it to brand it too.

Web Page Colors

2005-12-30T08:03:00.000-08:00

I want to make my site look interesting and professional.

The original color scheme was a light blue backdrop, a dark purple navigation area with yellow links and white headings. The main content area was white and large so looked very busy with all the text and links.

I thought about keeping this color scheme but in the end I decided to get rid of alot of the white area. Also, even though I felt the colors worked, I decided to move away from the bright colorful look and go for a dark, classy look.

So I am making the background black. The content area will still be white but in a central column. The navigation will be a grey column on the left. The main navigation links are white with teal colored sub links which will expand out according to which main category you are surfing.

I also added mouse-over color changes in the style sheet.

It's important to have a white background for the content are since this color converts best to sales and is just like 90% of everything you read offline such as books and newspapers. Also, images are easy to add to white backgrounds and avoid problems around the edges of the image.

Dark backgrounds emphasise colors and are fun to work with in the areas outside the content area. Backgrounds can look good with a repeating pattern, I tried it with some pixels in shades of grey to give a silver effect but I found that my links were distorted by the pattern. To get around this, I added a solid grey backgound behind the links. But in the end, I decided not to have a silver/grey site.

Web Page Layout

2005-12-20T08:24:00.000-08:00

Now, my site comprises a logo, banner ads, Google Adsense links and content pages together with a footer and navigation links. So there are quite alot of web page elements to layout /position on the page.

To start with, I will consider the people that I expect to visit my site.

I am providing material of interest to webmasters and want to also generate income. So I am most interested in adults and people not short of money. So I will assume my visitors have a browser window of 1024x768 or higher. Also, I will test the site with IE6 and Firefox which are the 2 most common web browsers in use.

To make the most of the screen area, I will use a fluid web page which means the content area with stretch and shrink in width as the browser window size changes. I think it's a bit dated now to use a fixed width for your page based on an 800x600 screen resolution since much of the screen will be wasted on newer computers and the page can end up looking silly and very deep.

For a site with ads, it is not a good idea to have a long scrolling window since the ads are likely to be scrolled out of view. So I will aim to keep the ads in view when a 1024x768 browser window is used.

I will go for a 3-column design where the navigation links are to the left, content is in the middle and ads are to the right.

I have already used this approach in some of my sites such as AWE Consulting and it seems to work very well. In my new design for urgentclick.com I want to ensure that the outer columns are just the right width to accomodate ads and add neat little product review boxes.

Another twist to my approach is the insistence on pushing the content code up to the top of the page so it maximises search engine prominence for my keywords. I do this with css positioning techniques that also eliminate tables. In fact, with table-based layout you cannot push the content code above the logo and left navigation links.

So, in summary I'm going to have a fluid 3-column page design optimized for a 1024x768 browser window using CSS positioning for the page elements.

Stay tuned...

Latest Blog on Blogger.com

2005-12-20T03:40:00.000-08:00

I set up my own blog before to post news about changes to Urgentclick.com but it got plagued with comment spam and referral log spam. So my latest bright idea is to start a new blog using the services of Blogger.com and let them take care of any problems like that.

My site is focused on webmaster tools, tutorials and a directory. Originally it started life offering a free visitor counter for webmasters. But when this got very popular, my web host couldn't handle the traffic so I had to discontinue this service.

Anyway, I feel that as well as posting updates about my site, I can offer some great webmaster tips. What I'm planning to do from now is to design a new template for my site for 2006 to fully optimize it for revenue generation and make it look very slick and cool. I will be using fluid tableless design utilizing the power of CSS positioning.

So if you want to know how to banish tables from your site, bookmark this blog now and subscribe to the RSS feed. Looking forward to link swaps etc.