I love messing with web pages, although sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming trying to get a large number of gift shop items organized and figuring out how the pages will make some kind of sense. I've been doing that today, starting with the butterfly and insect painted animal pins. We have SO many styles of painted animal pins. They are gorgeous and fun, and I want to get all of them online in the next few weeks. Our older site optimizes better than the new one (longevity does make a difference online!) so even though I can put them up and organize them faster on the new site, they're just not being found. I thought I'd try to bring some of that organization back to the original site and get them up where people are at least visiting the pages in larger numbers. I really, really want to get this done, it just takes forever. I wish I had more time to devote to this one project. To be honest, I can say that about all my projects, but this one is on the front burner today.Another purpose for the revamped page is that I finally got a BlackBerry and surfed the web with it the other day for the very first time. It's VERY cool! I love the way phone calls and e-mail links tend to merge. Either or. The PDA doesn't care. You want to call? OK. You want to e-mail? No problem! I also see some of the issues with reading web pages on a hand-held device, and I'm attempting to build in some assistance for phone surfers. I'm making links that take you easily back to the top of the page, and I'm beginning to eliminate the endless sidebar menus that you have to scroll through to get to the meat of the content. These can be overlooked on a computer, but not on a hand-held. I'm starting to discover some of the web-surfing shortcuts when using the BlackBerry, but there's no point in making a web page harder than it needs to be. (I know, I know - one should be using CSS, but I don't find it that easy or that much fun, so I'm still working around it for the most part. I did try it. I just don't care for it. My old-code pages actually work much better and faster on a BlackBerry than I feared they would - better than this blog, for instance.) And. Cleaning up the pages is nice for the design, too. It's funny. It seems the form follows function thing works here, too. "Necessity," or at least preference for making the pages easier to use is helping me see the logical way to clean up some of the junk I've been wanting to streamline. What could be better?
