Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Introducing Dio Bach's Web Fun v6.0

Well, here it is. Based on templates I made recently for another of my sites, I've given my oldest and favourite blog a major overhaul. I think this is about the 6th version of the site. From the heady early days on blogspot to the move to its own domain, this is the one site that I've maintained regularly the longest, albeit with varying degrees of attention on my posting.

Gone are the reams of links and clutter on the navigations and footers, gone is the old and sprawling digital gallery and empty articles sections and gone are a lot of old legacy formatting and layout issues I created for myself over the years. Fixed are all the broken images from earlier sub-domain abuse and slip-shod forward planning, optimisation issues and a bitty behind the scenes maze.

I've been moving towards cleaner sites a while now. Minimal clutter, table free CSS layouts and larger fonts for readability's sake. The maxim 'less is more' is increasingly becoming my outlook with my sites and the number of them I try to maintain and make earn my keep.

Change Log

So, what's changed? Well, the emphasis here is now towards my digital photography and other creative efforts. The old and sprawling digital galleries full of my work are dead and gone. There were thousands of mediocre images in there for every good few I posted here on the blog. My life's cluttered enough as it is, and with no time or will to maintain them, they got the chop.

Now the digital gallery section references back to the blog. One day when I have time I may make some 'best of galleries' to feature there - but as it stands now you can quickly see what I feel are my best photographs via the digital gallery pages.

Also gone are the old sub sites - the blog, articles, reviews, etc that were still lingering in the odd place. Also gone from the main page are all the eclectic links I'd built up for some of my favourite things. Instead there's an all new links section so I may be more inclined to add new stuff and leaving me able to increase the signal to noise ratio on the blog.

There's a brand new contact me form, which I've found has cut down on my spam considerably on other sites that I've used it on. I've also added a brief about us page for anyone interested enough to want to read it. Gone are all the blog buttons and chicklets that used to sit at the bottom of the page as well - pointless and noise making, I've got shot of the lot.

You'll notice there's a links to my other creative work in the left navigation with links to the headlines of my other postings on my other blogs. I'll just mention it's not being done for vanity purposes. Firstly it may entice surfers over to the other sites, and secondly there are some other related benefits to it that I won't discuss here.

There's also a brand new digital photography store section, which I'm still working on. I've increasingly been moving into affiliate marketing on my sites as a means of generating cash with great success. Previously I thought my path to self-sufficiency lay in the AdSense ads and similar schemes, but affiliate is the way for me from now on - hence the distinct lack of AdSense ads on the site now.

A lot of what I intend to do with the store section won't be seen directly, it'll generate revenues via search marketing - but it's nice to have something there for those who surf in via organic results to have a look around, or to reinforce the offers that people arrive at via other means.

And Finally

I'll end by saying thanks to the people out there who drop in once in a while and check what I'm up to - you all continue to be a big inspiration, even if I don't insinuate my presence as much these days. Any comments on the new look would be appreciated. This blog will be five years old in the summer, so with the new direction, I'm thinking there'll be many more anniversaries in the future!

Posted by Dio Bach at 16:24

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