www.ishigaki-japan.com
RichieRich - April 25, 2009 - 00:16
Hi there,
I currently live on the small Japanese island of Ishigaki. I've decided to set up an English portal for it. Content is a bit thin on the ground at the moment but I'd like to know what you think. There will be a right hand sidebar for advertising later - currently just trying to get it to appear in search results on google.
I started with the Amity Island theme and applied Nice Menus to the Primary Links area. This has resulted in some flickering and unfortunately the menus only extend to a maximum of one level.
Natrually lightbox2 has been used for the galleries (all photos done by myself).
Feedback very much appreciated.
Thanks
Richard
No comments?
Doesn't anybody have anything to say about my site...nobody at all. Feedback would be really appreciated, and be as critical as you like (I already know that the pictures are pretty but I'd like some design criticism etc).
Thanks in advance,
Rich
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Nicely organized, easy to navigate, and the photographs are beautiful. One little nit is that on my 1024x768 resolution there is a very small, and probably unnecessary, horizontal scroll. One other suggestion-- for a such a beautiful place the theme is quite sparse, I would want something more visually appealing but ymmv.
Nice job!
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Thanks WorldFallz
Yes, that horizontal scroll bar is there at any resolution. I need to get that sorted - clearly a bug. With respect the the theme being sparse have you got any suggestions. I'd love to give it that bit extra which it's missing at the moment.
Thanks again.
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I have like ZERO (with a capital Z-E-R-O) design skills, but there's some nicer theme's here on drupal.org (of course 'nicer' is a relative judgment). There's also Artisteer which I've been playing around with and seems pretty cool.
Another option is adapting something from http://oswd.org (like zenlike, since the site is about a japanese island) or http://freecsstemplates.org.
_
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Hi Richie, a very nice
Hi Richie,
a very nice portal. You did it by yourself?
just some little suggestions:
1. the photos are so nice but the lightbox slideshow refresh rate is so fast.
2. if there's any traditional Japanese music of Ishigaki?
3. as a non Japanese, how can I go to Ishigaki? some more information for travelers are very useful.
any way, it is already a very nice portal.
We go the drupal way. How about you?
http://www.drupalway.com
Thanks mm167
It's my work in terms of the content but I started with a free 3rd party theme - Amity Island. I added NiceMenus to it, but other than that I didn't tweak that much.
You're so right about the music. I'm actually negotiating with a local at the moment about presenting his music on my site, such as that made with a shamisen (a three-stringed guitar).
Yep, there will be a full travel guide. Airport and maritime port info will provided and I'm hoping to get together with local hotels and advertise accomodation. I'm still trying to get my head around the approach to this though - charge for an advert, or take a cut of takings.
I'm also going to do a nightlife guide including pubs and restaurants. It's all good fun. My first experience of building a website and it's already getting quite a bit of attention on this small island.
Thanks for the comment.
very nice!
looks like lots of original content! any particular reason why you didnt make a contact form in the contact us page?
you should consider putting up an events or calendar page i think are one or two booking modules in drupal.
the butterflies should be named so the search bots can find them.
video would also be nice. you could even use pictures and voice if you dont have video. i think google really likes original video content.
you should consider joining and posting on travel, sports and and other forums like for butterflies to get backlinks to your site.
and consider getting another favicon instead of the drupal thingy. good luck.
Thanks socialtalker
Great tips there. Actually, google was picking up all my image nodes and listing them over the other pages so I ended up blocking access to 'node' in robots.txt as I was concerned that it may fail to list other more important pages. I'm wondering if I did the right thing now.
Forums - great point. I'm doing that now. Actually my google ranking is the biggest headache at the moment. Currently my ranking on Yahoo, MSN and AltaVista for the search 'Ishigaki Japan' is number 1. On google it's around 400th! I have no quality external links to my page and google seems to consider this way over content. It's comical at times as google actually returns this page in search results as drupal's site is heavily linked to, so many users are finding my site by accessing this page. Google needs to sort out its algorith as currently it returns a lot of generic sites as top results when it comes to travel searches.
The contact page was one of the first pages I did and I haven't really messed with it since. I was considering adding a contact form but to be honest they've always irritated me a bit as a user - being forced to fill out fields etc. I'd personally rather just know the email address. Also, a lot of my contacts here are Japanese and it's helpful to them if they can simply see my email address on the screen and type it into their mobiles. Still, the page is missing something at the moment. I need to tidy it up.
Events calendar - on the to do list. Lots of events here.
Favicon. I keep putting this off. I have photographic skills but give me a 16 X 16 block and I'm useless.
Video content. Definitely going to have this. Next year I'm going to video this event rather than just taking pictures:
www.ishigaki-japan.com/culture/haari
I'm currently considering moving the main menu to the left of the page rather than having it as a horizontal menu at the top. The reason is that I'm going to run out of room very soon.
I need to decide on the advertising block width too....suggestions on this would be great.
Visit the island if you ever get the chance, Ishigaki is probably my favorite place on the planet, having said that, I did chose to live here...
I'm currently considering
you site is has many beautiful pics, the two col works so well for your site. wont making it a three column distract from the pics? cant you run some additional menus in the footer or at the very top, including a search button?
couldnt honestly give advice on that other than i read on other sites, namely research and test, test, test.
also a really nice rotator window on the frontpage would be groovy for a pic site like yours.
ps.there are also software/services where you can submit your site or one of your articles to hundreds/thousands of directory sites. also submitting articles to "associated content" and stuff like that.
Hello
Funny and glad to find a Drupaler on a remote Japanese island, LOL.
Let me inform you that here in Japan, we now have a decent sized and relatively active group (started a couple months ago), some of us are native English speakers. We're composed of Tokyo and Kansai folks and just getting started. Come and join us!
We'll be at the Open Source Conference in Kyoto, Nagoya, and maybe Tokyo and Open Source World (Linux World) this coming July at Tokyo.
http://groups.drupal.org/japan
Regards,
Scott
Hi Scott
I think it's only right that you hold a conference on Ishigaki sometime. It's about a 3 hour flight from Tokyo. Flights are cheap if you book over a month in advance:
www.ishigaki-japan.com/transport/flights_to_ishigaki
Where are you from? I'm British.
Rich
Update
Hi there,
I've just given my site a bit of a shake-up. I've ditched the Amity Island theme which I was using and I've created a zen sub-theme instead. The Amity Island theme was fine but I found that I was finding it difficult to make the changes which I wanted to make. Plus, rebuilding it from Zen formed the basis of a great learning excercise as my CSS skills are rather limited to say the least.
Once again, criticism greatly appreciated.
Rich
Multilingual
Hi there,
My site has now gone multilingual (Japanese and English). I haven't used the internalization module as I'm not a big fan, but I pretty much got all the functionality which I required by simply presenting different menu blocks based on the path prefix. I current have no ability to switch between English and Japanese for a given node, but who really needs that anyway?
www.ishigaki-japan.com