Keeping your Site Fresh

The addition of a new section, the Celtnet Affiliate Information section to the Celtnet has allowed, for the first time in ages, me to think about the site's design and how it works. I've been working on the site for several years now and the site's basically grown organically as I've added more content and more sections. Each one has had a slightly different design and a slightly different look and feel, mostly due to how my skills have grown over the years. This does mean, however, that much of the site is completely inconsistent.

Some pages are very simple, others are incredibly complex and I'm definitely not driving either traffic of clicks to large areas of the site. Basically I had lots of site real-estate that was woefully under-used. In addition I was building large databases of potentially useful content, but those databases were, at best, driving only a single page or region of my site. It was time for a complete re-think. OK, so I couldn't re-vamp the entire site over night and there was lots and lots to do.

But, if I was clever then I could kill two birds with one stone. I could continue adding the good content I needed whilst, at the same time, working on a new site design and layout. I wanted the pages to be more visually appealing, to have more places for ads at the side-bearigs and to have far more opportunity for adding dynamic content.

I came across a very nice CSS-based pattern for this a couple of weeks ago and this has now been re-coded to suit my needs and released as the basis for the Celtnet Affiliate Information. One of the worst pages in my whole site was the Celtnet Recipes home page. As this was the official portal to one of the largest and most popular areas on the entire site this was basically criminal!

As you can see, the page has now been entirely re-done (compare with the West African Recipes page for a feel of how it looked (actually it wasn't even as good as this). Now I have nice navigation tabs at the top, a navigation menu on the left and content that refreshes itself in the main windows. I can even add extra adverts to the side-bearings without drastically affecting the content. I think it's much better and this version of the web page will soon be rolled-out across the entire site.

What I also like is that the general 'look and feel' can remain consistent across the entire site but substituting a single logo (which belongs to a global site-wide family of logos) can instantly tell the visitor where on the site they are. The various regions of the site can be better linked internally, maintaining more of a discreet feel so that someone interested in mobile phones, say, can just navigate within the mobile phone region of the site. Someone visiting the recipes section only needs to look at the recipes section of the site etc yet all these distinct site regions can be tied back to the site's overall home page and master index.

This way I can keep Celtnet's Celtic region, the Recipes region and the Information region (with its medicine, information, programming, internet marketing and mobile phone sub-regions) separate but entirely linked. For the first time it will be possible to integrate the site possibly and to drive better advertising across the entire site.

This is a major change, but it shows that you should really design your site before comitting to the coding first! But I'm a programmer and an information provider rather than a designer. Ah well...

I'm also hoping that the resultant better integration within the site will increase my exposure to the search engines and my exposure to my site's visitors. I'll keep any results (both positive and negative) in this blog.

You can learn more about these changes and how they relate to SEO, web design, and keeping your visitors interested in your site on my eZine Celtnet WebInfo eZine