The Daily Haggis v9
As you can tell, the site got a bit of a facelift tonight. Design is still basically the same as far as colors go, but the layout has been adjusted to allow more room on both the sidebar and the main content window. I’ve already added a few new features such as dynamic article rating (with no login required), and a few under-the-hood tweaks. I’ll go over the bigger list as soon as I get some sleep!
Expect more changes over the next few days as I fine tune the new layout and tweak the sidebar widgets.
UPDATE: Click below for a list of Changes & Additions in version 9:
Okay, now that I’ve slept and worked on some of the smaller parts of the page, here’s a list of changes to the site:
ADDED:
- Article Ratings - You can now rate each article on a 1-5 stars rating. The highest rated posts are then analyzed and displayed in the sidebar, as well as the full-on Stats page.
- Movie Ratings - A miniblog of sorts with reviews of some of the recent films the authors of this blog have seen.
- Navigation Bar - much slicker and more functional than the Tabs from the last version
- Subscribe - This page will list all the ways to subscribe to The Daily Haggis.
- Category Icon List - On the sidebar you’ll notice all the familiar category icons from the articles, all in a neat little row. Clicking on any of these will show only articles from that category, just like in the posts. This basically replaced the text version.
LAYOUT & FUNCTIONALITY
- Updated Wordpress to 2.2, and updated any plugins.
- The site is now 900px wide instead of the paltry 700px from before. I realize that many have moved up from an 800×600 resolution on their monitors, thanks to Google Analytics.
- Swapped the Sidebar and Main content windows so the sidebar is displayed on the right side now. This is done for layout sake, as well as better organization for search engines to index.
- Improved sidebar - Not only is the sidebar much wider than before, but it’s more dynamic to the part of the site you are looking at. On the main page, it displays the icons for MySpace, Last.fm, Vox, etc, but if you click on an article (as if you were going to leave a comment), you’ll notice that the icons are replaced with what I refer to as “the meta box” which contains a bunch of information about the post, and all the things you can do with it. I moved the Digg This! and Deli.cio.us links there, as well as the Email This link. The article rating can also be found in this box. Check it out!
- Under-the-Hood Styling Tweaks - Switched the Heading formats for everything on the site, making the H1 tag the article title (most important), sidebar items H2 (semi-important) and anything else in H3.
- Bolding - Changed the bold font color to a lighter shade to make it stand out more in the articles.
- Sidebar Banner - Yes, I added another AdSense banner. I’m still considering it, but I’m trying to basically have this site pay for itself. It’s getting close already, just needed that extra push. Although if I see another ad for John McCain come up, I’m definitely killing it.
REMOVED:
- Any of the King widgets, as they broke with Wordpress’ official support for dynamic sidebars. Ended up building a custom sidebar anyway, but still integrated the dynamic.
- Tabs - as mentioned above.
- Tables! - I can’t speak for some of the plugins that may come and go on this site, but I have finally rid myself of the bulky, slow loading table structure of the past and exchanged it for the slick fast loading CSS styles. You’ll find no TD tags here, folks.
I’m sure there’s a few things I’m forgetting, but that’s the majority of it. I’m looking forward to seeing the visits increase from the change in layout, and see what happens with my search engine rankings using some of the things i’ve learned from my job.
Enjoy!
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