blondish.net

How to Attempt to Tidy Your Site

Have you ever been told that your site was very cluttered? What does that mean? Does it mean you have too many graphics or it just seems everything runs into each other. It almost seems as if I am talking about a bedroom. However, a website can be compared in some ways to your bedroom. It is your place online and you are letting people in to see it. So think about it: Do you want people to see your messy room?

I wrote the article How to Tidy Your Design and Make it User-Friendly to address this issue for those looking for a few extra morsels in improving their site. The article covers the basic label on introducing those who have not taken web design courses to whitespace. Also addressed in the article are the two main focal areas that webmasters should be tidying up.

Now, let me emphasize that when tidying up your site, it boils down to harnessing the whitespace. You do not have to totally sacrifice design. You do have to consider what items could either be removed, or what items can be moved to its own page.

Below are just some extra pointers that are not mentioned in the article, but should not be forgotten when it comes time to clean your site up.

• You do not have to put every social site account you belong to.
• You also do not have to put your affiliates buttons. Put their text link instead or put a blogroll together.
• You do not have put put all your information about yourself on the sidebar. You can focus on putting that on the webmaster/ webmistress page.
• Divide your site into the specific categories or page sections which are more relevant to your site. If you have a lot of visitor items, a long page that is named ‘visitor’ containing every single item can be daunting to your audience. Also the title is very vague. Make it unique.
• Make sure to hook yourself up with a sitemap. A sitemap will list all your pages and posts in case they cannot find what they are looking for by normal means (ex. through your site search bar, or your navigation)

Of course, in the end, make sure your site is how you want it to be. Just like a bedroom, you control your site’s look.

Tags: blog, web design

New Graphic Section - Background Tiles

I have been planning to put this section up for Background Tiles, but I have been shoving it off to the site. I finally got it done. I actually introduced it to the Tweeps at Twitter as it is nice to have something to decorate your page there. One of the backgrounds offered can be see on my Twitter page. Currently there are ten, and I am pretty sure that in the future, there will only be 10 on a page as the previews are 200×150 pixels.

Each preview has a desciption and title. All of the backgrounds are in PNG format to retain quality and have been zipped up. I am trying to monitor how many times some of my items on my site, especially graphics. I am also trying to crack down on possible hotlinkers.

As a final note, the background tiles can be used for layout backgrounds. No credit is needed, but it is appreciated. However, no claiming these as your own.

Enjoy!

Tags: graphic design, site news, web design

PHPads

After some time collecting dust, I finally had the time to update PixelledADS. I also decided to change the name to PHPads because most of my work is not at Pixelled.com like it use to be. The problem that I troubleshooted with PixelledADS was that it was not allowing users to log in. This is no longer an issue.

What is PHPads? Well, it is a simple banner management that has an administration panel and a way for the user to monitor stats on a single banner campaign. As the administrator, you log in enter the banners, and then the script will produce the banner rotation code that you can place on your website. It requires no MySQL, but it does require PHP 4 or higher. Installation is easy.

There is a page describing PHPads and a link to be able to download the script. Hopefully with time, I can place more features to this script, but I think that having something basic as this will do wonders. Perhaps I might even create a WordPress plug-in for it in the near future.

Tags: internet, scripts, technology, web design