Empuriabrava Online Blog and News

The Redesign

Those of you who have visited Empuriabrava Online before Tuesday will have noticed that the site has undergone a major redesign, one which you hopefully like. I just thought that I’d briefly explain why I redesigned the site and things to expect in the future because I haven’t quite finished doing everything that I want to do.

Improved Navigation

The main reason behind the redesign was to improve the navigation of the website. I’ve added so many things over the past couple of years that even I was having difficulty finding what I wanted! With that in mind I set about reorganising the site so that there is a constant navigation style on every page and that all of the pages are grouped into main categories. Hopefully it is now easier to get the content that you want.

Improved Layout

The previous design felt a bit cramped. When I first created the site the thinking at the time was that everything should be “above the fold” which in web design terms meant that the user shouldn’t have to scroll too much down the page. Now we know that this doesn’t matter; that if the user wants to find the information they are happy to use the scroll button. This means that designers are now able to spread the pages out; use larger fonts and line heights where appropriate, add more images and give the content room to breath as it were. Hopefully I have achieved this with the new design.

Photos

The photo gallery used to be a set of smaller images that linked to the large photo. Now you will see that each image opens a main image window that itself allows you to view the next/previous image without having to constantly return to the photo gallery page. This use of the Lightbox javascript library has added an extra functionality to the gallery.

Advertising

The redesign has allowed more space to be used for advertising and so you will see a few more Google Ads on the page. Empuriabrava Online is a labour of love, a hobby if you like and I have to find some way to cover the costs of web hosting, domain name renewals, my time and the like.

Things to Do

As I said, the site isn’t completely finished although everything on the old site is already in the the new design but there are one or two things left to do:

1. Add a “Things to Do in Empuriabrava” section and fill it with ideas and articles such as a page on boat hire, skydiving, cycling etc.
2. Expand the bars and restaurants pages to include detailed information on places that I or readers recommend. For example, a restaurant would have a photo, address, type of cuisine, average price etc.
3. Make the main parts of the website availalbe in other languages. I’m going to start with French partly because there are thousands of French visitors to the town but mainly because my wife speaks French and can translate for me!
4. Change the look of the blog and forum to reflect the new redesign and add new sections to the forum (thanks Paloma for the suggestion).

That should keep me occupied for the next couple of months!

I would really appreciate your feedback about the new redesign and your suggestions about what other things you would like to see on the site. Please feel free to leave a comment on this post or pop over to the Website Redesign thread on the forums.

Thanks.