6H Ranch

www.6hranch.com
July 6-July 6, 2008
A commercial site redo.

Screen shots and notes --

The main page gives a quick idea what this site is about -- Trophy Elk Hunting in Texas. Page describes the contents of the site with hyperlinks (of course there are always the ones on top).

I scanned and used client's existing logo. They also had a lot of pictures of hunters and elks on their previous site, so I used them for all the graphics on the site.

Unlike the previous version of the site, I took off the prices on all pages except the Booking page. That serves two fold: to encourage excitement about 6H Ranch elk hunting before turning away because of the price, and to minimize the amount of modification needed at a price update.

I kept the navigational layout of the original site. The page "Your Trophy" is really just a description of elk hunting. Perhaps later the client would like to add more detailed information about 6H Ranch in particular.

I developed it so all the pages look alike to emphasis the text, which was written in a nice style (seemed like previous developer might have been a hunter himself). Therefore all the pages have the same size logo, header, etc.

The previous version of the site also had a link to hear an elk bugling. I've omitted that because it required a special plug-in for the end-user. Would be fun maybe to find a standard sound file to add.



The next page was the Trophy Room, a gallery. The previous gallery was framesets with thumbnails and scroll bar on the left side. This gave me a chance to try the prettier and cleaner "inframe" instead, and I think it worked beautifully for this purpose. I also reduced the number they were taken possibly in Montana instead of Texas. I think the fewer numbers of pictures worked well, and would be more likely to be clicked since all can be seen and all are of hunters with their huge Trophy Elk.



Previously this next page was titled Hunting Details, but since the site discusses "booking" so much, I changed it to "Booking Details." I didn't change any text here, however I'm not sure it describes the current services and process. Will ask the client to review it carefully.




And the last page is the contact page.

The client did not have a high level domain email address so I set that up with their hosting service, GoDaddy and with a CC to me for testing, but I will change to the appropriate email for them after I've completed the testing and received their preferred email address for CCing.

I did something I do with all sites: I obfuscated the email address with a little java to cut down on harvester spam.


Summary --
The client requested my services because they needed to update the prices and the contact information. Had the whole site not been in jpgs and gifs, I could have changed just that data. But since it required a redo anyway, I enjoyed giving it an updated look and a subsequently easier way to maintain it.

Also, because of the content in text they should now begin to develop a better position with the search engines!

Other Misc Notes --

On all the interior pages I put a link to my website development blog. (I did not put one on the front page.)

I developed the site for both Firefox and IE. It won't be quite as pretty as these screen captures but it was developed to work on an 800 pixel wide screen, although some of the graphics though may float improperly.

Also I added the sitemap.txt file in the root directory for Google. I also looked at their 404 page ("missing.html") but did not update it with a site-specific version.

I don't know if they have been watching their site statistics or not. I didn't check to see how or if it was set up. It might be something they would be interested in having done.

I also cleaned up their webhosting space of the data for the old version of the site. (I did store a copy on my system, for the short term.)

Note: the client also has three domains:
www.texastrophyelk.com (the hosting account)
www.6hranch.com (a pointer account)
www.montanatrophyelk.com (another pointer account)

Hours worked so far: 22.5 hours