The final stage of a final (if you believe that one, I have the Golden Gate Bridge for sale, cheap) Toolemera Press website rebuild is now live. Which is to say that lots of links and stuff will be messed up for a while. Honestly, I do check everything before uploading. In this case, I had to take down the entire site and reload from scratch. Lots of CSS code needed to be cleaned up, images resampled, old pages and their ghosts removed, etc.
No matter how hard I try, there are always some errant links that go poof. If you come across any links or images or pdf files that continue to be recalcitrant in their bad behavior, just drop me a line and I'll fix it in the evening.
There have been some major navigational changes on the website:
The primary subjects are now Trade Catalogs; Books & Booklets; Photographs / Trades & Crafts; Manufacturers & Merchants. The EAIA has it's own spot on the Gateway page as does Jim Esten's ISP service.
Trade Catalogs is now compressed into from "By Type" and "By Date" into "By Year". Within each set the catalogs are arranged in order by year and I will continue to add new material in this order.
1800-1869
1970-1979
1880-1889
1890-1899
1900-1909
1910-1919
1920-1929
1930-1939
1940-1949
1950-1959
When I add stuff from later than 1959 I'll figure that part out then.
There is a new navigation bar for Trade Catalogs which is giving me problems. It's there, but not yet working as it should. Never fear, I will whip it into shape soon.
What was Trades & Crafts is now Photographs : Trades & Crafts.
Three distinct sections have been combined: Manufacturers; Merchants and Manuscripts is now one section: Manufacturers & Merchants. Arranged by business or personal name, I am much happier with this navigation scheme, based on a book indexing format ported to a website. Each item has it's own page. All in all, this should make updating material much easier, will allow me to remember what I have on the site and hopefully make it easier for people to find what they want, or just to browse the site.
How did I come up with this stuff? I've been watching the overall website stats through cPanel X, the excellent set of site management tools Jim Esten has provided. By tracking entry and exit pages, hit ratios on pages, etc. etc., I can see what brings in the most traffic and what areas are ignored or never found. While reading an interesting by dry book on Indexing and Abstracting (what library types read at lunch for fun...), I realized that a good old book style Index was called for.
It's interesting how, with the transfer of so much knowledge to the web, that old style indexing still works. Search is fine, but you have to know what to search for. Browsing is fun, but people tend to browse only what they are interested in. Hopefully, this new Index for Manufacturers & Merchants as well as the date delineated list for Trade Catalogs and the focus on Photographs for Trades & Crafts will allow people to enjoy the site while helping them to find what they are looking for. Or to find what they haven't been looking for.
Till next, Gary
Postscript: Thanks to feedback, all but one bad link has been fixed. The last one for 'How To Paint Your House', will take a bit longer... sort of like how long it really takes to get around to painting your house. And, the Trade Catalogs nav bar is working too. For now.
