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My Travelogue |
The whole world |
Welcome |
A collection of stories about my years of overland travel, holidays and short breaks, around the world.
A story about my overland trip from London to Johannesburg, the layover in Southern Africa, and back to London.
On page notes and credits
Photo Galleries; No off page photo galleries.
Page banner and side photos; Sunrise at Finnsnes Norway and Holiday Island, Maldives
Page Status; On going contribution This page last updated:
Building this website notes
Notes and thoughts on building this website.
Introduction
This site is not a commercial enterprise, it is not build with the objective to generate footfall so as to promote or advertise anything. It is very defiantly a not of profit activity, without advertising or commission. I do not even expect a large number of visitors.
Accordingly, it is build with this in mind, as a hobby, as hopefully an interesting read, and occasionally informative.
This is my journey using new tools, and learning new skills.
Notes about Google Maps
This is a note from the previous travelogue which was contained within the main site, but applies equally to this site.
I did have some difficulties with the automatic pagination in Google Maps. With the help of the forums I found out that there is a maximum number of points on a page so as not to slow the map drawing unduly. I therefore could not get the trip on one map. That is not a problem as it is better shown in phases. However, just so you are aware tracks or active logs recorded by a GPS represent a lot of points and it seems the best way is to have a replica in an overview and the GPS track on its own map. I hope this is of help and explains the numbers of maps. Thanks again to Google Maps and Google Maps Help.
How this site was built
This site is built using Microsoft Expression Web 4. My first web building attempt was based on NetObjects Fusion Essentials, a free package, This was followed by an upgrade to NetObjects Fusion XII. According to NetObjects web site Elements is a HTML generator instead of a HTML editor. I agree, it is very easy to use and produces a very good end product. Slightly less impressed with Fusion XII though. It does not seem to keep pace with developments. Also, upgrading the my main website for 'Essentials' corrupted some things, including the dropdown menus. However, this was my fault as I have since learnt that it is not recommended to change authoring tools. But enough of that, I moved on to the Expression Suite.
Expression is a totally different software product. It is very much more involved in the code and CSS. I am hoping that it will prove to be better at handling large websites. My main website had over 150 pages when I decided to change and split the site up.
The included templates are a very good starting place, but being the person I am I have to move on from those, and stretch my knowledge and skills. However, it is not just a case of finding an menu item and inserting it. I have to use Google and the wealth of healthy forums and help sites there are on the web. Here are some of those I found helpful along the way.
The starting point for my excursion into building my own template stated with the tutorial at Expression Web Designer Help
The dropdown menus are based upon the work of Expression Web Designer Help again, Dot Net Curry, and the code from Red Team Design.
I had rollover text on the my main website but could not find out how to do the same in HMTL 5. Two sites helped resolve that problem. Thanks to HTML5 Doctor and W3C. This solution used figure and figcaption. However, the caption was out of position. Dreamincode forums was an early port of call. .... unresolved
I also had scrolling tickertape on my main website and found help and code at Expression Web Designer Help and JavaScript Kit.
As the layout gets more complicated the positioning becomes more difficult to control. Especially when it appears OK in the design panel and Super Preview, but changes upon rendering to the browser. I found a useful tutorial at CSS Tricks
The next improvement I searched for was last updated date to be inserted on a page, and immediately found 'by-expression.com'. I am not looking for every page, just the entry page for the main sections. The code did exactly as I wanted it to.
I was still having problems with the rendering of the layout. I decided it was time to review progress again. I was effectively trying to create a three column flexible width with both vertical and horizontal menus. Time to start again, but a little more adventurous.
The first redesign
So, the new plan, now that I had learnt a bit more about layout and CSS. I would have a lot more in the master, dynamic web template, including a top line navigation menu instead of down the left side. This set of menus has no drop downs and is based on one of the menus I found earlier. The menus are for the whole of the Ivan Hurst combined site, irrespective of host. It also includes all of the sub-domains. The master would also include a large image, across most of the width, to replace a smaller image previously in the body of the Norway pages, with a different one on each page. The travelogue would be a sub domain of ivanhurst.me.uk called travelogue.ivanhurst.me.uk.
The next level of menus would be for the whole of the travelogue sub domain. However, each of the main elements of the travelogue would have it's own sub-site to allow a different banner photo. These menus would be drop down, but fixed before the development of the sub-sites. This would provide a consistent and integrated drop down across the main travelogue site and all of the sub-sites. At some point I may investigate if you can have multiple master dwt. It would result in unmanageable menus across multiple sub-sites if that level of menu just be for main navigation. It would also be a very complex headline menu for users if it had than six layers or more to cover the whole site.
After the header, in the master, there would be two additional rows inserted into the template for menus and page navigation, page image, and page note. The down side of this approach is that there are two many menus and too many clicks. The heading area is too large before the page content. However, I have not thought of a way around this at the moment.
The page content area is now just two columns, the right fixed width and the left, flexible, to fill the available space on the monitor. The left hand column with the whole site menus having been moved to the top of the page.
The footer also has a lot more content area, and drop down navigation menus.
Hopefully this arrangement will suffice for the development of the site, which I envisage will become quite large. I also want to make it dynamic and interesting, and perhaps interactive.
A long delay as I worked on the photography site and all the trials and tribulations.
So back to the development of this site. Completed some more of the introduction type pages and created nested masters.
The nested masters based on a sub-site and existing pages did not work quite as expected. I created a new overarching prime master with the information pages as a sort of sub-site based on the existing master, with cascading editable areas. Eventually managed to stich them together with only a small loss of content. I now have a master which manages the whole site and next level master for managing sub-sites. A workable solution for the moment, until I develop a content management system base site.
I researched the possibility of adding a breadcrumb to the site. I found a number of helpful sites including mtekk, and especially Search Engine Journal and got the code from Javascriptsource. A little special configuration and it is working well, and hopefully looking good.
ratings Sixrevisions.com
Outline of progress
| 1/9/2012 | Started this version of travelogue site |
| 31/8/2012 | Started new travelogue test site |
| 30/8/2012 |
Tested rolling images and new dropdown menus |
| 29/8/2012 | Accepted that layout problems of three columns required a redesign |
| 17/8/2012 | Trials of HTML dropdown menus complete |
| 19/7/2012 | Start of new travel site |