Website Work. No, Not The BIG One...
Yes, I need to work on the festival website. I did get the additions to the ticket page added, at least. But that was about it...
So what have I been doing all day long (with barely a single break)?
Working on one of the smaller festival-related websites. I found out this morning that one of the two sites I've made mock-ups for needed to be Live NOW. Wow, timing is everything! The thing is, mock-ups have FAKE links inside that link to the mock-up pages, hidden in a subfolder where I FTP so people (including me) can view these pages while I'm working on them -- prior to making them Live.
And then there are the 'old' pages that need to be re-created with the current template. Why? Because they've been spidered and the URLs are out there (bookmarked and in search engines and so on). I generally create what I call 'Whoops!' pages -- that basically say something like: Whoops! That page no longer exists. You need to go here. (With a link to wherever I really want people to go, of course.) To these 'old' pages I add the nofollow coding (meta tags) that should keep them from spidering in the future (I hope). The goal is to have all the new pages spider out and replace the old ones (fingers crossed).
Today after seeing the new event logo (and changing the header banner to use it in place of the old one), I decided to change the website colors. Previously the event logo was a combination of red (very bright red), black and white -- but the new one uses our wine-colored red, instead. Ironically, the sponsor at the website has a bright red and black logo -- so I figured the color change was essential.
I also needed to do any number of tweaks, including adding the Social Media images and links. I put the Google Translate code in, too, figuring 'What the heck' -- there might be people who want to read it in another language. It's predominantly text right now, with only a few images, so it translates very well, accordingly. The old version of the site had images for the navigation (!!!), so it would have been a mess to translate. Images for navigation buttons is old-fashioned stuff, and this is one of the reasons WHY. If you use CSS and text for navigation, then it translates perfectly -- and people can actually navigate in other languages.
I'm pretty happy with the design and how it's turned out -- and it ended up saving the festival some $$$, too, which is always a good thing. Hopefully I'll only have to swap things out a couple more times, so I can get back to concentrating on the big (real) website. Of course, I still need to get the other smaller site Live, too -- so there's more of this exact work that will need to be done at some point soon...
In non-website-and-non-coding news, it's DAMN COLD here. We're having record lows (including low highs -- crazy sounding, huh?) here. And it's the end of February, for crying out loud! I hope it warms up soon.
Marilyn has Court judging tomorrow -- and I'll be working on a batch of IT-related projects in the office while she's doing that. I'll need to crawl under desks and so on, but at least I won't be like Marilyn, with little or no chance to sit down all day long (!!!).
It's close to 7:00 p.m. and there's no sign of her, yet. I knew she'd be working late, so no surprise there. She's dealing with a sensitive PR situation today that's blowing up like crazy. (I know she did radio, but I don't know if TV was involved. I tried checking for it, but didn't see anything. It's already hit the newspapers...) I hope it doesn't become a huge deal, but we've known for ages now that it would be a problem. (It was the focus of our Communications Meeting on Tuesday...)
Well, I'd still love to get my hair colored. But I can live if it doesn't happen until Sunday... And my crazy cats were REALLY NEEDY all day long (!!!). I tried to be kind, but at one point I just shut them downstairs. I don't know if it's the cold or what, but they were driving me nuts. (sigh)
We need to shop tonight, no matter what. I doubt we're going to feel like it, though!