Building a Better Website Day #7

Well, I had a few hours this evening to work on an updated design for the site.  I made a lot of progress.  I still have to fix the pesky AJAX control for the main news story popup window.  I’m looking forward to rolling out the functionality to the rest of the site.

So far, I like the design.  It still is pretty utilitarian, but I like it:

Old Site

 

New Site

 

So, the next step is to fix the AJAX popup window, clean up a little CSS, and then roll it out to the rest of the site.

 

 

Building a Better Website Day #6

The homepage is just about complete.  I still have some HTML warnings to clean up, but I’ve got the functionality in place (and things are behaving pretty well in both IE and firefox).

So, what I have left on the homepage is:

  • Clean up HTML warnings
  • Fix the AJAX popup window for the main story’s image.
  • Tighten up the right column a bit
  • Review ad placement
  • Review SEO – I think we’re 99% of the way there.
  • Create a new logo.

Once I am done with that – I can move forward on the rest of the site.

 

Building a Better Website Day #5

I made great progress the last 2 days on the updated comicbooknews website.  I had a good couple of hours this weekend to work on it.

I’ve got the navigation pretty solid now.  Rule #1 when developing a new website is to make sure you’re testing in IE and FireFox the whole time instead of going down a long path, only testing on one browser.  The navigation is solid and I’ve added an enhanced "Featured Stories" section.  The functionality is similar to the existing site, but I added a little more SEO and fixed the randomly pulled story.

The Google Ads are in place, although I may swap out the ad list on the left side for something else, but the rest of the ads are in place.

Tommorrow I need to see if I can fix the main story popup ajax window in IE.  It works great in FireFox but not IE.  After that, I’ll add the next 9 stories to the right of the main story.

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