Building a Better Sleaze

Right now I'm in the middle of reassembling an off-line version of The Sleaze using the new page templates I've been promising for an age now. Whilst most of the code could be altered by using and extended 'find and replace' on my HTML editor, poor design on my part when I wrote the existing templates means that some items can only be altered manually. Consequently, I'm having to go through every story page using the old template individually, altering these elements. Whilst mind-numbingly repetitive, this process is reasonably quick, meaning that I'm progressing through them quite quickly. The main delays come from the necessity to break off every so often to work on a new story. Nevertheless, I'm hoping that it will be a case of 'New Year, New Sleaze'. Hopefully, the effort will be worth it, with improved navigation, easier to read text and a better indexing of old stories.

Of course, I could eschew any ideas of style altogether, as many web sites seem to do these days. Sadly, it doesn't seem to affect their traffic. The problem these days is that many people seem so obsessed with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and making their code search engine friendly (or what received wisdom tells them is search engine friendly), that they seem to forget that, ultimately, web pages are intended to be read by human beings, and therefore should be designed to make this as easy as possible. These ideas should extend beyond the HTML code to the content - writing articles to make them supposedly search engine friendly, can render them unreadable for human visitors. Stuffing the opening lines with 'key words' has a tendency to make an article incoherent. But that doesn't seem to matter to many site owners, as to them a site is merely somewhere to host lots of adverts which will hopefully earn them revenue. It doesn't matter if any of their visitors actually read anything on the site, just so long as enough of them click on those ads. But enough of my whingeing and back to the grindstone!