This time, its not my own!
I mentioned a couple of days ago, I did another test, just to see how Instagram worked and mentioned it was for another site. You can see this site when it’s up on https://tymaran52.wordpress.com/
Well, I went to a pub and got my iPad out, I never thought about developing a site on the worlds smallest computer, but I did it and, create a basic barebones of a site. Its only four pages. Its also proves one other thing, what peoples intentions for sites are. Her’s is to promote her dog history with the Irish Red and White Setters. Now the question I had, how do I deal with what is more like a technophobe? I.e. someone has little interest in comparison to me about computers? Well, find the easiest site to manage (I recommended WordPress as it is easy), set up the plug-ins and create the lowest amount of pages. I also used a free account on WordPress, which looks exactly like what I use to manage this site (save for some discrepancy to work within the WordPress ecosystem. I didn’t have a plan sadly as that wasn’t revealed to me, so what I did was just produce a bare bones site to get them started, which consisted of:
- Home
- Blog
- Contact me
Then tested everything. One thing I will say, producing a site, this is what I recommend everyone starts with. For a design, ask yourself the question
WHY?
For me, the question to why was pretty obvious, I have a lot of Trainz content to promote and produce, so producing a site to come to, primarily to download my content is a good start, it has a purpose. The question then I ask, “are you regurgitating anything else on the web?” in that are you actually constantly copying everyone else’s material, then I’d wouldn’t go any further because of the issues of copyright. These days, its getting worse these days as there are a lot of companies that will happily pursue you for a copyright claim, my dad has found this out.
“Are you producing original content or promoting content you produce?”, this could be products and services. In my case, a product but its for free.
Professionally “how are you going to fund it?”, mines cheap, so its currently funded by my (limited) salary. Free sites exists if you don’t mind tons of advertising, but other than that, its a consideration. If you got lots of files, the killer is bandwidth, meaning the amount you transfer to and from your site to your audience. Storage is usually quite cheap these days.
Originally, my mum wanted to do something with instagram which I hope I don’t have to explain what it is as Meta products are in our lives on line in one way or another. Instagram however, is limited, it is for displaying content for content consumption, I.e. photos and videos, its not the appropriate use if you want to talk about in my mum’s case, history of the dogs, who is who and what the tree is like. (E.g. a family tree of the kennel name of Tymaran). This is what you have to think about, your target audience, your content and your interaction. Even if it is looking for work, then again, I’m not, but I put my CV and LinkedIn profile up to say if something comes along that I like, I’ll take it!
Once you have some ideas, don’t just go out and create something, it won’t work. Plan it, even if you have HTML WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) and thrash out some ideas to get the overall look and feel of the site. You can even do it on pen and paper, that is how I started this site but I lost the origins. Don’t copy, but look at inspiration from other sites or even the world around you. For me, I like trains a lot, so a rail map was the biggest source of inspiration, this I decided had to be the navigation bar. (Idon’t know what to do with the header, so I just added a rendering (from another project of all things), so thats why I came up with what I had. This becomes a template and a lot of sites are built like this. In reality, your template can have content anywhere, some sides like mine have a navigation bar to the left, not seen it for the ones I’ve visited to the right yet, but a lot (possibly to make it more responsive) put the navigation at the top in menus.
Now you need a story board. What categories are you going to split your site into? Trial and error on this, However, you can have multiple layers, but there is one rule to consider – 3 clicks. “Can I get to most of my content in 3 clicks or less?”. If the answer is “Yes”, its a good design, otherwise no, remember, your audience is probably not going to stick around for long. Don’t make your pages too busy either. Can you find the text you want without burying it deep? No, make it clearer. (I’ve used an “accordion” plugin for this reason on my Models page and to keep loading times down).
From there, consider your mobile and desktop users. In fact, consider your mobile more than your desktop users, why? Because I guarantee that most of your traffic will be from mobile users. A site thats hard to read on a mobile phone or tablet will deter users from using your site.
Finally, accessibility. I’ve incorporated it in this site, but as a lot of users now considered to have a disability or those that don’t have a disability but find it hard to use your site, is a turn off. If you notice, I have (an otherwise annoying plugin – sorry) that aids with that. My eyes love small text, my mum can’t read as much as I can at higher resolutions on the same screen size and she isn’t disabled. Likewise, I find black on white more difficult than white on black.

Then test, test, test. Test with the oldest, test with the newest, test with a small item, test with a large item, test with all sorts of operating systems (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, Kindle, etc), or get others to test it for you. When it comes to testing, you can only do so much, so you’ll never have a 100% success rate.
Test the links, test to see everything loads, just test everything, create a test table if you have to. You may have to go live, but other than that, call it a day. You’re done. Well, for a static site. As soon as you go live, you are going to get a million problems. Its called Hacking, its called spam, you’ll have a lot of it. Enable 2FA authentication as a minimum and a strong password.
Now call it a day unless you want to connect a load of apps.
Talking of testing, I got my Kindle out, it works on the web and noticed that some of the items produced by WordPress doesn’t work.

And if you want to go really old, sadly my old laptop also doesn’t work 🙁