Jan Leow's Press Blog


Web site makeover

Make over your own web site page by page is tough. That’s how it is for my travel destinations related web site. It started out that way so I just left it as that. And since this is my most successful web site, I’m somewhat content to leave it at its current hosting location. Though I wish could do more like install scripts and such. Previously I couldn’t do so until my recent discovery of the use of CNAME function was I able to merge Sitesell Site Build It together with BlueHost to make a potent marriage.

Cameron Highlands Travel Destinations web site screenshot
Cameron Highlands Malaysia Travel Destinations web site screenshot. The makeover is slow going but hopefully it will be completed soon.

The steps and procedure was not easy. And it required contacting Bluehost support to make CNAME domain transfer to work. With it set up, I could now make the sub-domain from Sitesell Site Build It point to the Bluehost web hosting servers thereby giving me the chance to install scripts like phpBB forum software or anything that might be useful to make the web site grow!

Having ran my web site for several years now, I felt I needed to improve the appearance of my web site. It looked awkward in some places and the HTML, CSS and JavaScript codes were all over the place, quite messy I’m afraid. So I decided to redo the web site, clean up the code and make it easier for future posting of article content. To the visitors, it is all invisible, but to me, it was a real big mess! It took me about a day to recode and tidy up the HTML and CSS, and clean up the appearance of the web site. It still retained the beige background for the text and sea gray blue of the header and sidebar. I decided that was my web site trademark and stuck with it.

The only thing left to do was to transfer the HTML codes to the previous files, and it was really tedious. I have nearly 200 web pages currently and while I was updating the code, I felt some need to tidy up things here and there and that really slowed me down my task of makeover. I think I’m only a third of the way through my file list. This was going to take awhile. This is the bane of making a web site page by page instead of using some CMS software like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. Because it is a simple build a web page and post it online, the advantage was you don’t have to deal with a botched bad upgrade of script updating that might make you lose the entire SQL database. If you are not in the habit of updating your web site theme frequently, a page by page web page creation and posting online would just be fine. Besides, improving the aesthetic of your web site is not quite the driver of good traffic volume. It is the provision of good quality content that draws in the visitors and build up a successful web site.

In addition, I also needed to figure out how to modify the WordPress websites to match the overall web site look and feel. That was another day worth of trying to understand the inner workings of how a Web site theme template and customizing it to match the theme. If it weren’t for my passion and interest in hacking at web sites, I would have given up.

The new look looked a little smarter and it was also easier for me to post content. Now the only thing left was to update the remainder of the pages. Looks like it is going to take awhile before I complete my task of web site makeover. Oh, well…

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