New Photo Store Coming

After being inspired, yet again, by another trip to Maui this past April, I'm in the process of putting up my first eCommerce site that will sell both prints and digital downloads of my many Maui photos.

The site design is still in progress, but many of the details are actually already handled for me. How? I'm planning on signing up for a SmugMug Pro account that once configured, will handle everything from the credit card processing and fulfillment, to the printing, customer service, you name it. That leaves me to pick which photos I want to sell, clean them up and adjust them for printing, and then upload to their servers. Pretty neat.

This is giving me the chance to really focus on the site design as the main effort, since they even give you the templates and page markup for the galleries as well.

More details in the coming weeks.

Breadcrumbs for Ka'anapali Dreamin'

It took me the better part of a day yesterday, but I was able to update and test all the 80+ pages of the Ka'anapali Dreamin' site yesterday with breadcrumbs. Part of the work involved was related to the 5 or 6 different page templates I have setup in Dreamweaver for the site, ranging from the simple content pages that only contain one column to the section pages that have a sub navigation menu as well as a sidebar with photos.

It wasn't as complicated as I had thought it would be, since I've been dreading having to do it for a while. Once I got some momentum, it turned out to be more daunting than anything else. That will just go to show me to think of those things up front and work them into a design earlier rather than after that fact. :)

Launch of Igloo Surfing Coming Soon

My initial hopes was to get the Igloo Surfing site up by the end of the year. Obviously that didn't happen.

I got back into the site development about three weeks ago, and didn't I didn't like the color scheme I was starting with so I re-did it. I also worked on the logo for a little and came up with something a little more elaborate than just the domain name in bubble letters.

I have the majority of the supporting text and pages ready now in Firefox, so it's just a matter of testing it out in IE 6/7 and working out the bugs there. Once that's set, the next step is to create the blog for the site (it will be a blog-site rather than a site with a blog), work the layout and style elements into the blog template, and off we go.

My latest target is getting it launched by the time we go on vacation (mid-April), so that shouldn't be too difficult.

Minor Design Updates to webnelly.com

While it's not a full site redesign, it does feel better than what it was before.

I started by moving the site navigation up to the top and be horizontal rather than vertical. I started to play around with having the logo overlap the navigation a little, which led me into doing absolute positioning in CSS (of which I hadn't tried out very much). The end result took some tweaking, but I'm happy for now.

Also, to help fill out the horizontal navigation, I added two more sections that I'm expanding on. The first is Projects, which is going to feature details of the various projects I've worked on in my professional (corporate) career. This will be set up to contrast on the technologies side with what's listed in the Portfolio section, which features the personal sites I have worked on in my spare time.

The second new section I'm working on is the Technology section. This section will feature many of the technologies I use in my personal sites (to start) and provide some insight and examples of how I implemented them. They're not targeted to be full blown tutorials or anything like that (as if I have that kind of time), rather more of just an overview and inspiration for anyone else interested to want to learn more.

These sections look a little (or a lot) empty right now, and will take some time and commitment for me to get around to updating it all, but I'll get to most of it eventually.

If you're reading this, you can probably tell I updated the look and feel of the blog to match the new changes to the site design as well. If it's also your first time reading here, you probably didn't notice how blank it was before. :)

That's where I'm at with updating this site for now, short of adding all that content to the new sections. Time to spend my efforts elsewhere.

Website Previews in Portfolio Pages

One of my todo items for the Ka'anapali Dreamin' website was to feature other websites in the Reviews section. As part of that, I wanted to include a way to include a preview of the site I'm reviewing.

I came across websnapr. It's just a very simple site that lets you enter in a URL and it generates an image in one of various sizes. To test it out, I used it to add previews of my own sites at webnelly.com. You can check it out by viewing one of the site pages here.

Working on Ka'anapali Dreamin' Mobile Site

I started working on a mobile version of my Maui website, Ka'anapali Dreamin', and what I've put together so far can be found at http://kdmaui.mobi

I'm focusing on making much of the regularly updated content available on the mobile site, and paying close attention to keep things simple and elegant, small and speedy. So far, I've added a few things like the current date/time in Hawaii, the Hawaiian word, phrase, and fact of the day (more info), the current weather conditions, news and the daily photos. All of these things already exist on the main site, so it's partly just making it available for web-enabled phones.

The one area I'm struggling with a little bit so far is for blog posts via Blogger. I have no problem parsing the feeds available from the Blogger Data API, it's more the matter of identifying and resizing any images that existing in those posts so they're not as large in terms of download sizes on a web-based phone.

If you have a web-enabled phone and want to check it out, you can go to http://kdmaui.mobi. If you also have any ideas for new content, or maybe have a site of your own or know of a few that might be good to look at, go ahead and post them here.

Thanks.

Creating your own iGoogle Theme

I found this a few weeks back, but just started playing around with it a few days ago. For Google fans like myself, the Google API section was recently updated with an API for creating your own iGoogle Themes so you can customize, create, and share your own themes for iGoogle.

The concept is pretty simple, and one of the things that I always thought was neat was that iGoogle Themes could change their displayed based on the time of day. Although the concept is simple, it's been my experience thus far that putting together and testing out these themes can be a little tedious. However, these could just be minor annoyances that I'm only experiencing because I haven't gotten the full hang of it yet, and I don't want to influence anyone who hasn't tried it for themselves yet.

You can check out the growing collection of iGoogle Themes in their gallery here, if you need a little inspiration. The one I'm working on now is a Maui theme goes along with my Ka'anapali Dreamin' website. It's likely going to take some time, so I don't anticipate it being ready for a few weeks. Once it is, though, I'll be sure to share it here.