First - thank you all for visiting my new website, all your useful comments and positive feedback I received. It’s been two months since I launched Motion In Social and it seems to be attracting a lot of interest. I had over 1500 page views and over 600 visits. It might not sound much, but it’s six times more than my previous (crap) academic website got in 18 months - so I can call it my small online success ;-)
Now it’s about time to revise the site and make some updates. Following feedback from the data I obtained using Google Analytics, I decided to make a first major revision of the website. This includes:
1. Entry page. Google In-page Intelligence clearly indicated that people looked on the top part of the front page, but only 50% of them bothered to scroll below first half of the page. I revisited the entry page so it’s more compact now - manifest is simplified, and the project page links are reduced to simple one sentence text and iconic-style image. I also added section with publications and presentations at the bottom together with ‘about me’, just in case someone wants to look at it (which no one does, but hell, there is always a chance ;). Also, instead of big news section, I combined it together with all social network links.
2. Project page. It turned out that people didn’t look much at the project pages and some of the project pages were almost empty in terms of media content. So I merged all the projects descriptions into one single page, with simpler styling for movies and images, and single row of columns for text. This way I combined eight separate pages into a single one. It’s easier for you to look at the biog overview, and easier for me to update any new info. Punchterms are still a separate page - it was popular, so I just updated the style to match the Project page.
Some technical info on update for geeks and Bitheads (I love this term - from Stephenson ‘Snow Crash’:).
3. My website is now taking full advantage of Paul’s Irish HTML5 Boilerplate techniques to improve compatibility and loading time. It works like a dream. The best thing is simple to use build script, highly customisable, which minifies you JS, CSS, compacts (gzips) your images, removes comments and does all the other fancy stuff that boosts your page loading time. There is a lot more - great reset sheets, super-compatible CSS solutions, great HTML5 , htpss script for super-duper caching and other stuff that I don’t fully understand, but highly appreciate. Kudos for Paul Irish!
4. You can now add my website to you iPhone/iPad home screen and it will have it’s own icon - I think it works with Android too, but check it and let me know (Pies).
Cheers!
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