Websites

It is ALWAYS a good idea to test anything you do on the web on several browsers. That’s why I have both a Mac and a Windows XP machine–I refuse to get Vista for now–just too much trouble.

Anyway, yesterday I posted my second Slideshow Pro for Lightroom created flash slide show. The slideshow is just below this entry–and included photos from Do Day Day. The day before, I posted a slide show of Southwest Alabama scenes that I’m also using for the Alabama’s Front Porches website. I tested this earlier slideshow under Internet Explorer and Firefox and possibly Safari for Mac. Once I posted the Do Dah Day photos, I tested the slideshow on my Mac using Firefox–that’s where I do most of the work on my blog. All was fine and I patted myself on the back for successfully including two slide shows on my blog. This morning, Ann got to work and looked at my blog using Internet Explorer. It didn’t work.

It was an easy fix (involving renaming div tags so that each one has an individual name)  and all should be working fine now–as far as I can tell it is, anyway. The bottom line is to always test, test and retest.

I recently compiled this information for my friends at Your Town Alabama. I really enjoy doing this blog–one of my favorites.

1. The newsletter went out to the largest number ever: 625 email addresses (some bounced back, but that’s pretty typical)
2. Since February 16–the first day of the blog, there have been 101 entries in the blog! (I meant to highlight it at 100, but got carried away…)
3. Prior to February, our average daily traffic on the website was a high of 286 (this was June 2007, so that sort of makes sense as it is the month of the annual workshop). Most months averaged under 175 per day, however. Currently, we are averaging over 300 per day. People are also looking at considerably more pages of the website as well–most notably the blog section.
4. This one is mostly for Paul: If you google our town Alabama, the Your Town Alabama website is currently number 1. The same goes, obviously, for googling Your Town Alabama.
5. We’ve gotten some nice comments from folks. Lee Sentell and Charles Ball, particularly took time to respond to the email with a thanks and positive thoughts.
6. In keeping with what I said in the email I sent out, I’ve made a particular point to update the blog since sending out the email–anyone that checks it again will be pleasantly surprised, I think, to discover new information: I’ve added 4 posts in the last two days–mainly to cement in the heads of people that the blog does get changed frequently.
7. We saw a significant increase in traffic on the day of the update email and the day after.  Our average traffic per day prior to the email for the month of May was about 320. On the day it went out, our traffic increased to 479 and the following day, it was 384. That isn’t quite the jump in traffic that emails once generated, although it is still a larger amount of traffic. I chalk that up to the increase in general traffic–I think that more people already check the blog for information and don’t need an email reminder, though clearly some people do.

Visit the blog at yourtownalabama.org/blog.

I’ve just about wrapped up a new website for the American Institute of Architects, Birmingham, Alabama Chapter. We’re still in the testing and review stage, but I’m particularly pleased with it right now. It involves using the many good photos that they have–and we’ll change these photos out regularly–in a Flash slideshow. The Flash was pretty easy to accomplish using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and an optional plug-in called Slideshow Pro. I’ve used it before, but never with Lightroom. It worked really well, but not flawlessly. I had combined it with a Spry menu to manage the links (easy to set up by itself as well). For some reason, these two things didn’t play well together. A bit of hair pulling and then a quick search on Google helped me to track down the solution. Once that was in place, all worked as planned–what a nice change!

I developed the look of AIA’s previous website as well–still really like the look of it, but it was time for a change as the website was about 3 years old. Here’s a before and after.

Before:
After: