Tuesday, March 03, 2009

I done did it!

Howdy!
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out microsoft frontpage and trying to figure out how to build a website back when I first set up my business.... quite frustrating at times.... and once I finally got a page up I did very little to the index page over the years. Well, it was due for a refresh and today I sat at the computer and went to work.

I never was able to come up with a transparent background for the photos like I mentioned in the last post. A friend suggested I try saving the image in .gif rather than .jpg and that nearly worked, just had some excess stuff showing up where it was supposed to be transparent. I finally decided to just turn the background a solid color, then match that on the webpage so they blend. The Dragon Moray above is the same one from last May or so, only the background has been blacked out.

Anyway, it was with some trepidation that I did this, as the website is the business's lifeline. In many ways, it's a lot less "noisy" website now and some people may prefer the look, previously the blue wavy stuff that surrounds the blog played a prominent role on the first page, now it's much more subdued. I've tried to keep as many elements from before as possible so I don't get dinged by search engines and lose traffic - search engine optimization is some kind of mystery for the most part, but I'm thinking I'm getting a little clued in over time.

Pat's off in Oregon visiting friends, it'll be interesting to hear her opinion on it. I've tried cleaning it up some, keeping (actually adding) photos and adding some extra information on the front page that people had to search for before. You can check it out here.

Aloha,

Steve

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I like the new homepage. Much "cleaner" and easier to look at. Nice work!

Steve said...

Thanks, it's growing on me. Letting go of something I've poured a lot of time into is kinda tough, but it's definitely easier to read. I spent all of an afternoon and evening doing this, back in the day it took what seems like weeks to get the front page the way I wanted. I may have to start working on the other pages.

Aloha,

Steve