Web design, perpetual tweaking.
01 Apr 07 Filed in:Web design
Back in the summer of 2006, I had a classy Italian website designer and coder at ((( Bonsai Studio ))) work his magic to produce the Pisstakers theme. It was based on a schematic by Oscar Furgoni. The Latin touch was there for all to see in the comical, colorful and irreverent attitude to the rules (ie barely a straight line in the building!)
In January, along came the cows from Net Disaster who ate up all the tasty bits, dumped on the rest and forced us into a revision.
What you see all around you is tweak number 3. Uh? You may ask, what is the difference between January and March's theme? All looks the same.
Yep, it certainly does look similar, except it has been tweaked to be more user-friendly. When you mouse over the face icons, they change color just to let you know you have entered facial territory. Most important.
Then, if you roll over the Search, Bloggers and Contact Us bar, thanks to a rocket up our behinds from a usability expert on Sitepoint, the text and icons are combined.
Yeehah, now even a drunk pisstaker can click on them.
Little things, see, make all the difference.
Sometimes less is more, so we took the big text in blockquotes and shrunk it a little.
Keywords Since being advised by SEO guru-ette Linda Jenkinson, we have been working on an SEO strategy too, re-defining our keywords for the long term. Yawn, yawn. Satire and humor are still there for all to search, but as we don't know how to do political satire, we need more keyphrases to get anywhere with Google and co.
Consequently, as of last week, we are on a web search for the funny stuff in... (tech, news, or life, take your pick.) They are competitive words, and we will be buried for a while, for sure, but we have given ourselves plenty of time to cash in on their popularity. (Do a random search for these and prove that we don't come up!)
Content It can be dangerous to tweak with that shit, so as far as the verbiage and imagery, we aren't changing our style of posts. Still light and vaguely humorous with a point to it hidden somewhere.
Layout. There is still a summary of our posts on the front page linking to the full articles in the different sections of the website. But I have re-organised the homepage so that the Editorial blog content ie Ed's demented ranting and trips down memory lane stay archived on the homepage.
We search the web every day looking for news to satirise. Naturally, we come across loads of search engines. Ding ding. Therefore, in an effort to help out webmasters, or even people looking for useful/practical web search resources, we are building up a listing, with commentary, on all the search engines out there on the internet. Cool, hey?
This will enable visitors and webmasters to quickly see the current trends in web search (pay to search, etc), read a quick pointer and link through to fuller explanations - all written in Pisstakers child-like plain English. See, we like a laugh, but we also like to be helpful too. Pisstakers web search will fit the bill on both counts, we think.
So, that is where the tweaking has got us so far. Oh yeah, and the whole site is viewable on a mobile phone too. Minor detail!
Check out if your phone is Opera mini or Opera mobile compatible and take us out for a spin when you are next on the road, bored out your brainbox.
Tweak on, and if you think there is more fiddling to be done to make The Pisstakers work better for you, let Ed know.
A bag of gummi bears for each of the suggestions we implement!
In January, along came the cows from Net Disaster who ate up all the tasty bits, dumped on the rest and forced us into a revision.
What you see all around you is tweak number 3. Uh? You may ask, what is the difference between January and March's theme? All looks the same.
Tweaking a website
Yep, it certainly does look similar, except it has been tweaked to be more user-friendly. When you mouse over the face icons, they change color just to let you know you have entered facial territory. Most important.
Then, if you roll over the Search, Bloggers and Contact Us bar, thanks to a rocket up our behinds from a usability expert on Sitepoint, the text and icons are combined.
Yeehah, now even a drunk pisstaker can click on them.
Little things, see, make all the difference.
Tweaking fonts
Sometimes less is more, so we took the big text in blockquotes and shrunk it a little.
Still legible, and not Web 2.0 any more, but oh well, it takes up less space.
Tweaking SEO
Keywords Since being advised by SEO guru-ette Linda Jenkinson, we have been working on an SEO strategy too, re-defining our keywords for the long term. Yawn, yawn. Satire and humor are still there for all to search, but as we don't know how to do political satire, we need more keyphrases to get anywhere with Google and co.
Consequently, as of last week, we are on a web search for the funny stuff in... (tech, news, or life, take your pick.) They are competitive words, and we will be buried for a while, for sure, but we have given ourselves plenty of time to cash in on their popularity. (Do a random search for these and prove that we don't come up!)
Content It can be dangerous to tweak with that shit, so as far as the verbiage and imagery, we aren't changing our style of posts. Still light and vaguely humorous with a point to it hidden somewhere.
Layout. There is still a summary of our posts on the front page linking to the full articles in the different sections of the website. But I have re-organised the homepage so that the Editorial blog content ie Ed's demented ranting and trips down memory lane stay archived on the homepage.
Tweaking the services to web users
We search the web every day looking for news to satirise. Naturally, we come across loads of search engines. Ding ding. Therefore, in an effort to help out webmasters, or even people looking for useful/practical web search resources, we are building up a listing, with commentary, on all the search engines out there on the internet. Cool, hey?
This will enable visitors and webmasters to quickly see the current trends in web search (pay to search, etc), read a quick pointer and link through to fuller explanations - all written in Pisstakers child-like plain English. See, we like a laugh, but we also like to be helpful too. Pisstakers web search will fit the bill on both counts, we think.
Tweaking for the mobile web
So, that is where the tweaking has got us so far. Oh yeah, and the whole site is viewable on a mobile phone too. Minor detail!
Check out if your phone is Opera mini or Opera mobile compatible and take us out for a spin when you are next on the road, bored out your brainbox.
Tweak on, and if you think there is more fiddling to be done to make The Pisstakers work better for you, let Ed know.
A bag of gummi bears for each of the suggestions we implement!
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