Yesterday I spent a little bit of time rejigging the front page of www.vettycreations.com.au. It had been bothering me for some time that it was so wordy. There was just too much there for a front page. So I cut out lots of extraneous text and put in a new picture of all our wonderful Vetty Creations embroidery books.
I’m much happier with it now.
(If you find it doesn’t look like what I describe, you might need to refresh your page, and hopefully it will bring in the new version rather than using a cached one.)
I also did a bit of work last night on the books page. When I upgraded my computer programs earlier in the year I got Dreamweaver as part of my software package. Previously I have always coded my website pages by hand, meaning that I wrote them all in HTML, which I have taught myself over the years. Its been long and laborious, but I have a better understanding of how HTML works than I ever expected to!
Dreamweaver is a dream! I’m still only learning it, but I’m really liking it. In working on my books page last night, I found lots of broken code that was really making quite a mess of the file. Sure, it still worked ok, but the code wasn’t very clean. Its much better now!
The other thing I love about Dreamweaver is that I can do image maps. That’s where you have an image, where you click on different parts of it, and those parts link to various places and pages. To give you an idea of what I mean, at the top of this page, there is an image map which takes you to the various pages of my website, such as “books”, “hardanger”, “blog” etc. Instead of being all little separate buttons or images, its all one image, with the code set up so that certain parts of it link to different places.
I *dreamed* of doing this before I had Dreamweaver. But it would have been an absolute nightmare to try to code by hand, so I never even tried.
I created a new image map yesterday. If you go to the front page of the website, you’ll see the five books laying across the page. If you click on each one of those books, you’ll be taken to the individual page for that book. Nifty, isn’t it?! (Well, even if you’re not impressed, I am!)
White Threads is the blog of Yvette Stanton, the author, designer, publisher behind Vetty Creations' quality needlework books and embroidery products.
Very nifty! I am truly impressed!
So am I! (And I’m not trying to bignote myself – I’m just truly pleased that it can be done!)
And I have been wondering over the last little while how idiomatic my use of the word “nifty” is. I guess in North America, people probably would use the word “neat” instead. To us Aussies, neat means tidy and orderly, not “clever” or that sort of meaning. Glad that you understand my meaning, Rachel! Is it a common usage in the UK?
I think we understand the way you use the word “nifty,” but here in the US it is a little dated. Seems we used it back in the 60’s and 70’s maybe. But then I may be wrong there – my son uses it quite a bit now, and didn’t think it sounded dated. Maybe the word has been recycled?
I just really think that the use of idioms is so interesting, especially when it comes to different countries. I had never heard of the word “bignote” before, but I knew exactly what you meant!
I agree, your website really is nifty!