It has been a while since my last entry, being busy with work and all, so I’ve decided to spend some time this weekend working on the basic framework for TheDirtLab.
I’ve already written some content for it in my past entries (scripts, that is), so at least it won’t be empty when it goes up. Hopefully I’d be able to publish them by the end of the day or early Monday.
If you’ve visited the front page recently, you’d have probably noticed the mailbox on the far right side of the lawn. This mailbox will be linked to a contact form (which I haven’t started coding in yet, haha!).
Also, I’ve made slight modifications to the top navigation bar. The menus are now semi-transparent. I’ve yet to decide if I’ll keep it that way or revert to the old solid white and gray menus.
Aside from that, I am hoping to be able to find the time to work on the other planned features of my website. Please keep coming back for updates.
I liked how my CSS-based navigation bar turned out, so I thought of integrating it into my website’s design. As of this writing, I only included a basic “sitemap” menu and a filler menu for recent blog posts.
I’ll probably think of other things to add there as time goes by.
On closer inspection, adding that menu has a nice side effect towards search engine optimization, because a clean, straightforward list of URLs can be found at the very top of the code, before the other presentational bits. Which means search engines can see my site map a lot easier.
After trying many many times since sunday, I was finally able to make my personal website appear at the very top of the Google search when you try to search for “Chuck Cerrillo”.
Curse my very basic SEO knowledge, lol.
At least I tried and it eventually worked.
I was rearranging some stuff earlier today, I didn’t like how my alternate design turned out (the one with semitransparent content blocks partially overlapping with the top portion of layout). So I reverted to the original layout I made. I still have to work on the content area’s layout though.
Aside from that, I added two circular icons representing the major areas of the website. The first one being the home page and the second being this blog’s home page.
Also like previously mentioned, I coded in a little widget that grabs the ten most recent blog entries and displays their title and excerpt on the home page.
I’m still thinking what else to place into the home page though.