I have been tinkering with the web site again. Those of you who are regular readers have probably noticed already. I am actually always making small changes to the code, trying to make things work a little better or a little faster. The average user would never notice most of the stuff I do, but this last round of changes made a visual impact, so I thought I would explain.
I added the orange topics menu you see on the right to help with navigation. I became aware that some users didn't realize the images to the left of every article are actually topic icons and clicking on them will get you a listing of all the articles in that category. The menu is a nice shortcut if you are interested in a particular topic.
While I was making changes to the topic navigation, I went ahead and updated all of the icons. The old ones were outdated and amateurish. I like the new ones much better. If you click on all topics under the new topics menu, you can see all of the new icons.
The next thing I did was move the Google ads from the top center to the right on the home page. The ad unit size and placement were forcing a wide format that was cumbersome for people with lower resolution monitors, causing a scroll bar. Rather than force those people to choose an alternate theme, I decided to slim up this one.
As an unanticipated bonus to moving the ads, the page loads faster now. When the ads were at the top, they loaded before the content. When Google was being slow, (which seems to be more often these days,) it delayed the loading on the main content. Now that I have moved the ads, the content loads first, resulting in a quicker page load.
The most dramatic change I made is to the photo gallery. I first used the code for the gallery on the new Conrehabit web site. It is more efficient code, so the pictures load faster. You'll probably notice the speed difference the most in the slide show. And let's face it, it looks a lot better than the old photo gallery.
I hope you like the changes and they make for a better experience. I love hearing your feedback and your ideas for how to improve the site, so please let me know what you think.
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I love the changes - and you are right about the photo gallery.
You HAVE been busy!
N.