Grubtown Tourist Board site goes live!

Well, after only a week, the new Grubtown Tourist Board's web site (http://www.visitgrubtown.com) is picking up nicely. We have 90+ registered users and lots of nice new news stories and reviews to add to the Grubtown Daily Herald newspaper.

The site really benefits from the ideas of Six to Start (the folk that managed the project and came up with the design), and the lovely illustrations from Jim Paillot. Not to forget, of course, the wild imagination and writing techniques of Philip Ardagh (aka Beardy Ardagh).

For the technically-minded, the site was built using Drupal 6, with some custom maps using the Google Maps API. While Drupal and various contributed modules have provided much of the functionality out-of-the-box, there were still plenty of minor changes and customisations to make.

I've enjoyed creating this site, though: my first one with a falling cows option on every page!

Regnum Blinds website re-design

Just been working on a very nice new design for the Regnum Blinds website (http://www.regnumblinds.co.uk) - suppliers of sun blinds and awnings to homes, businesses and schools in the West Sussex area.

Used Drupal as the framework, with a custom theme based on the Zen starterkit: homepage has a separate template to get the custom layout. Might think about using Panels next time.

IE6, AlphaImageLoader, and links

I too have hit the problem where links, that are inside elements with (a) absolute positioning, and (b) a background image loaded using AlphaImageLoader, are unclickable. Yet another annoying IE6 bug!  The sooner that browser is dead, the better...

Anyway, I seem to have fixed the problem (thanks to others out there, especially Stu Nicholls and Drew McLellan, with their fix descriptions) by adding another div within the original absolute-position-and-semi-transparent-background div and to contain the link(s). This div has no use in other browsers, but in IE6 I apply the AlphaImageLoader background to that one, turning off the background-image on the original div. Since the AlphaImageLoader background is no longer applied to an absolutely-positioned element, all is well again, and links are clickable in IE6!

<div class="withbackground">
 <div>
  <a href="http://www.example.com">Link here<a>
 </div>
</div>

The normal style sheet has what you'd expect for absolute positioning and a semi-transparent PNG background image:

.withbackground {
 position: absolute;
 top: 10px;
 left: 20px;
 background-image: url(images/semi-transparent.png);
}

and then, in an IE6-only additional style sheet, we turn off the original PNG, and apply it using AlphaImageLoader to the child div, which isn't positioned:

.withbackground {
background-image: none;
}
.withbackground div {
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='images/semi-transparent.png', sizingMethod='image');
}

and with all that in place, the page works in every decent browser, and also in IE6!

SEO for business with two sides

I've been looking into how best to optimise the search engine results position for a local company called Bell Leisure. They have two quite distinct sides to their business: one half is selling pool and snooker tables, and anything related, and the other half sells, installs, and maintains swimming pools and hot tubs.

Their current site is all under the single www.bell-leisure.com domain, with two sub-directories for the two halves of the business. The effect seems to be that their site is listed well in pool and snooker table categories, and also appears well in search results for these types of product. However the swimming pool side of the business doesn't appear well in search results, presumably because it doesn't fit within the categorisation of the site as a whole.

If the company agrees, I'm going to try splitting the site into two separate sub-domains, one for each distinct part of their business.

So http://www.bell-leisure.com/swimming will move to http://swimming.bell-leisure.com, and http://www.bell-leisure.com/tables will move to http://tables.bell-leisure.com. I'll leave the existing "home" page at http://www.bell-leisure.com, and will put in permanent re-directs for the other pages, so previously-created links will still work.