Finished Site Upgrades!

After a great deal of work (and orders of magnitude increase in efficient processes), all of the site pages on www.commandmentsofyhwh.org are xhtml compliant, and I have navigation links on all the pages so almost every page on this site is only one click away from almost every other page.  The major exceptions are the individual chapter pages for the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  If you didn’t know those pages existed, you’re probably not alone.  When I originally put this site up 7 years ago, I unknowingly designed it with a lot of bottlenecks and long pathways between the pages.  What I have hopefully done with the extra navigation links is made the paths shorter and eliminated the bottlenecks, so that anyone who actually wanted to go from one page to another, can now do so easily.  Anyway, the bible chapter pages have not been cleaned up or validated, or had navigation links added to them.  Since there are nearly 200 of them, I’m not going to make it a very high priority.  If your browser doesn’t show them up right, let me know and I will move it up in the priority list.  But for now, I think they do what they need to do.  They don’t need to navigate to the rest of the site because most people will probably just click the bottom link to go to the next chapter, or click back to the book index and go to the other chapters they want.  If none of that makes any sense, just go here and see what I mean.

One  other thing I did was put a search box at the top of all the major pages so that at any time, a visitor can enter a search term and the engine will spit out the pages on this site that contain that term.  Below the search box then, every page has a set of 4 main links in red, then a set of internal links that navigate within that page, then a set of links that navigate to the other major pages on the site.

Lastly, I removed almost all the internal formatting on all the major pages and replaced it with references to a central style sheet.  I experimented a bit by changing the background and foreground colors of the pages, then I made all the text in all the pages a 72-point font.  That made the pages much more exciting.  But to make them readable again, I returned to a 10-point font.  I also changed the paragraph fonts to sans serif instead of serif, to see if that makes the site easier to read overall.

The reason I chose to spend my time lately making all these technical upgrades instead of writing articles is because I believe they will have an immediate effect on navigability and accessibility of the website and all its pages.  These changes are likely to create much more value than any single article I could write.  Go ahead and see if you agree about the changes.  Start here.  These are all the major technical changes that I think will make a substantial difference to the value of the website.  In terms of productivity, I’ve spent the 20% of the time to create 80% of the possible value, and I am not going to spend the other 80% of the time necessary to create the remaining 20%.  Rather, I’ll put my time into writing articles and other activities that will be of more benefit to you than endless minor site tweaks.