Sunday, May 07, 2006

Bingo Blog

I've spent the last week doing something that's been on my mind a while to do. The last year has seen me spew out a mass of sites based on some basic templates and working practices which, as the amount of projects grows, makes them time consuming to update and maintain.

On top of that, the code behind the templates was very verbose. Whilst it took advantage of CSS to style stuff, it was not well used so there was lots of code making up the pages and table layouts. Over the last year I've learnt more and more about css layout and things like semantic markup - which effect the way pages can both display on devices like screen readers as well as effecting how the page ranks in the search engines.

Wanting to put all this into practice, and thanks to some consistent use of templates and editable regions, I was able to quickly remake the underlying code of my Playing Bingo site. It's now completely table free, so if you take away the style sheet, it collapses to a single old style page.

The lack of underlying code is apparent in the file sizes. The table heavy old index was 12k, the new one only 7k and it has more copy than the old page. And just to blow my trumpet a little louder - all my code validates under the W3C specifications. Unfortunately, the third party code doesn't (Google and AdBrite - shame on you...), but still, I think it's my first page to pass that test.

For those of you still with this post, I've improved my ability to update the news section and RSS feeds by implementing a blogging solution. Before it was a case of manually making up three files and creating my own RSS feed manually. Now with the new and improved UK Bingo News and Blog - it's a no brainer. I've also used MagpieRSS to create automatically updating 'Latest News' includes which is another first. Now it's really easy to update - blog a news story, publish, done. I love blogger.

If that's not enough, I've also shelled out for another vBulletin license to make the Playing Bingo Forum. I'm a big fan of that software now I've got used to it, and seeing how Google loves my Weird Nations forum, despite it being very quiet, the benefits of adding one to the Bingo site pushed me to grab another license and get it up and running. I think the combination of blog and forum should help the site rank a lot better than it currently does - the financial benefits of doing so will become increasingly important.

I think the future months will see me redoing all my old sites to make them work smarter than I was able to before. My portfolio is so large at the moment I need to do it to make maintaining them a lot easier. I'm surprised it was so easy to do this one so quickly to be honest, so there will be a lot more of this to come.

Posted by Dio Bach at 21:52

8 Comments:

Greg said...: Think of the fun you'll have in June! Take a look and see what Flash is doing these days ...; 11:10 PM
Dio Bach said...: I've got admit Greg - I really hate flash websites with a passion. Horrid things. :)

Flash insets is one thing, but whole websites are just bad bad bad!; 2:43 PM
Elise Tomlinson said...: Hey Dio,
I really enjoyed this post because it's something I've been struggling with for awhile myself. I gave a presentation at our statewide Library and info science conference on how to design standards based websites and I spent months pouring over CSS, and trying to get my mark-up and css validate which is no easy thing...also, getting away from tables for layout which is also tough because of all the older browsers...urg.

Anyway, I have been creating a lot of sites for non-profits and I just got my first pay gig so I want to make sure the underlying code is crystal clean. Any other resources or tips you can suggest?

Did you do your "editable regions" using DreamWeaver templates?

thanks!; 6:05 PM
Dio Bach said...: Yeah - the editable regions are all in DreamWeaver. I found this site really useful for sorting out the floating elements: Floatutorial - there's a few good guides on there.; 11:14 PM
Elise Tomlinson said...: Thanks Dio, that's very helpful actually.; 9:19 PM
greg said...: Dio: I agree about completely Flash sites ... until it finally all gets sorted out.

Check out kenwilber.com
- it is very impressive, and extreemly well integrated (this guy's all about integration!) if a tad too 'hyper" for my tastes.; 10:22 PM
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Best Regards, Yuriy; 2:52 PM
holly said...: Oh no, Dio, come back! The porn spammers have started!

(Where are you? Is your job at the beeb done?); 8:32 PM