Problems so far and things to improve.
The website redesign has been live for over 24hrs and I've not managed to break it yet. That's a good sign. I've also had positive feedback via twitter: "I looked at your old site a little earlier. Your new site has a cleaner layout and much faster loading time." @Jamyama_Media which is a sign that I've taken things in the right direction.
Now for the problems; I'm not a natural programmer so what I've put together took longer than I'd have liked and it's still not quite finished. My lack of coding knowledge has also had an unintended side effect: I didn't know that different browsers display websites in different ways. All the testing that I did was based on Internet Explorer 8 (yes, I know some of you are probably hissing at me… but it's the software that I'm used to using) and I didn't know that I should have checked it on other browsers. Since the site switched over to the new design I've been told these things and I've had the chance to look at it on IE6, Chrome and FireFox. Unfortunately all three of these have issues that need to be addressed. I'll sum them up momentarily.
The other issue that I wasn't immediately aware of was tracking and analytics. The previous version of my website had it all built in, and naively I overlooked that factor; I've now corrected that by signing up for Google analytics and inserting their code into all of the pages on the site. It shouldn't have any negative effects on the pages… but if you spot something that's gone wrong, please let me know via comments or through the contents page.
Right; the errors that I'm aware of… starting with IE6 as that's the shortest list – everything seemed to work here except for some odd justification in paragraphs. This wasn't consistent across pages and I don't know why. I think it can be fixed by using a justification tag, but I don't know if it's worth doing if text displays normally on all other pages.
Chrome: the only error that I'm aware of in chrome is that tables and text that should be centred aren't. Both of these features were implemented using css in the header of each page – which is the way that w3.com suggests it should be done. I'm not sure how to fix this, but will look around for any guides I can find.
Firefox: the same error with non-centred tables/text exists in FireFox. There is also a second error regarding linking. I was taught that you could reduce bandwidth use and stop false analytic data from being reported by using relative links when working within a website – in layman's terms, instead of telling a browser exactly where to look for a page you could tell it where to look relative to where you are currently located eg. if you are at www.jaque-thay.com/fake_page1 and you wanted to link to www.jaque-thay.com/fake_page2then you could tell it to look for "\fake_page2″. This should ask the browser to go up one level and then down to the correct page and in Internet Explorer and Chrome it works as intended. In Firefox you end up with the following: www.jaque-thay.com/\fakepage2 . Of course this link doesn't go anywhere and thus you have a problem. I could fix this issue by renaming all my internal links but then my analytics software will think that you have entered the site afresh every time you click on a link and makes analysing data much more difficult. There probably is another way to do this, but I don't know it… so that's another issue that I need to look into.
If you notice any other issues please let me know and I'll look into them.
Moving on; there are still improvements that I want to make to the site. I want to replace two of the images that I use – now that is fairly easy, I just need some time with a camera and a willing photographer. I'll have that done within a few days. The major feature that I want to incorporate… and at present I have no idea how to manage this, is to integrate this blog into the main website and to have the sidebar automatically update with links to my most recent blog posts/items in the store. That is a feature that the old layout had, and it was one of the reasons I chose the old layout in the first place. I've had suggestions from other bloggers that I should completely redesign the site around a wordpress template… but to do that seems a little counter-productive when I've spent so long building the current design. The better solution is thus the far more complex one; learn to code competently enough to achieve the desired result. Obviously this will not be a quick process so in the mean time I am open to suggestions… or offers of help!
Once I've made some progress I'll post again and explain a little of what's happened and how it affects the site. I'll also be putting a post up in a few days with the news that I mentioned from my last entry. For now though, I'd better give you a way to get back to the site. Happy reading!
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