2022-10-31
Upcoming November KTracy.com Web Design Changes
October was a crazy month for the Ministry of Information Technology. We re-wrote the code that provides the latest image and latest Fitbit reports. Of course, about a week after we perfected the code, Kevin's Fitbit Sense broke. A new Fitbit is in the mail, so at least it wasn't a wasted effort. We also got the Staff page online; which was where we developed the new author cards now seen on each press release moving forward. Finally, we have directed all KTracy.com traffic to WWW.ktracy.com. We still are developing a tool to share the current page, but it may not be done in time as we had to write the Latest Image and Fitbit data code twice and that threw us off schedule.
In November, we plan on taking our foot off the gas a bit and optimizing what we already have. Here are our plans.
Eliminate The Sitemaps with Home Page and Simplified Archives
Unless we have a phenomenal traffic day today (October 31st), the web traffic is going to have taken a pretty big hit since adding the sitemap. We think the problem is that the manually generated sitemap has two drawbacks. First, and most obviously, the sitemap isn't being generated frequently enough to tell search engines to index new content. Second, the sitemap tool we're using is claiming each page has been updated at the time of the sitemap's generation. This is misleading to Google and likely causing some issues with the search logarithm.
This caused us to revisit the sitemap itself. The purpose of a sitemap is to link to all of the content on a website in one, easy to find link. It's a great tool when updated automatically, but if out of date, it discourages (or even disables) web crawlers from exploring the site. If your web site is really complex, the sitemap is going to help index all of the pages. However, KTracy.com's use of the home page and archives to link to literally every page update kind of resolves this problem naturally. Essentially, the home page and Kevin Tracy archive page function as two sitemaps for the site where all KTracy.com content can be easily found by a crawler. Thankfully, the archives haven't been rebuilt yet, because we plan to do this by simplifying the archives.
Crawlers will usually only go three pages deep into a site. If we continue building the archives as planned, we would have the following link depth:
- KTracy.com Homepage
- KTracy.com Archives (and year selection)
- Yearly Archive Page
- Archived Page Content
Obviously, this is four pages deep. To get around this, we're going to list ALL of the archive links in the Archives page. We'll use ID attributes to link to years and months throughout the page somehow once and refine the process once more of the archives are made available.
Improving the Mobile UI
I'm satisfied with the job the Ministry of Information Technology has done optimizing the content of KTracy.com for mobile interfaces. However, the header on the mobile interface leaves much to be desired. We may hamburger menu the top navbar and leave the store navbar in place.
The most important thing to Kevin is fixing the logo of the site; which appears almost entirely off screen, way too many pixels above where it should, however. If we decide not to touch the menus, it's because they work well enough and we're not sure what we ultimately want to do with the store menu.
Sidebar Issues
Kevin Tracy has expressed that he's unhappy with the quantity of text in the left sidebar. He'd rather use that space for larger links to his YouTube, Twitch, Grav, and Discord server; room for an eventual link to products from the KTracy.com Store; and more dynamic content (such as Kevin's latest video).
Kevin Tracy has also asked us to consider removing the Web 1.0 woodgrain pixel art backgrounds for the left sidebar for a dark red with a faint pattern, or adding a faint pattern to the blue.
Finally, Kevin wants to add some simple design elements to the right sidebar to separate the content a little bit. Eventually, both sidebars may take on similar designs, but for now, we're just experimenting a little bit.
Don't Expect Many Changes After November
For those of you who enjoy these blog-like updates on the refining of a personal, hand coded website; you should know now that we don't have much planned for December 2022. We plan on taking it pretty easy during Advent and the Christmas season. Don't rule out any surprises, but the structural changes to KTracy.com will be mostly on hold until the new year after November.
