Eye On Manchester blog by Aidan O’Rourke Tutor Photographer

Personal & professional diary on photography, languages, Français, Deutsch, local interest, art, music, travel and more

I’ve been in Bristol helping film maker Elliott Bristow with his www.retroroadtrips.com site.

We have added the facility to download MP4 films and MP3 music tracks at 99 and 59 pence respectively.

I developed the film strip design seen on the home page and film downloads page. I’m also doing other development work on site from home in Manchester.

I drove to Bristol on Saturday and returned this evening/this morning – departed 9.30pm arrived home 2am. The drive up the M5 and M6 was uneventful – unlike the previous time.

Weather in Bristol and along the motorway – cold, foggy patches.

Current music choices: Mariah Carey: We Belong Together (iTunes and in my head), Sacred music by Francesco Durante (Radio 3 along the M5), Muse: Starlight (playing inside Frankley services).

On Wednesday 3 December, after months of preparation, I made the long-awaited new design live

But within a few hours of making it live, on the basis of monitoring, I decided to start making changes.

Certain aspects of the new design didn’t seem to be working as expected. And I decided to rearrange the layout of the new links and accompanying icons, placing them at the top of the page rather than the side. I temporarily removed the Premium Galleries.

By today, I had completed the changes to make this ‘evolved’ design, which I made live. I carried out more testing and monitoring and found it was working OK.

The premium galleries will shortly be returning, accessed by contextualised links rather than a drop down menu.

Over the coming weeks, months and probably years, the site will evolve incrementally with small changes taking place here and there. I have learned that when you have a large website, it is often not a good idea to make a set of major changes all at the same time because if something has a negative effect, it’s difficult to find out what it is. A website is a kind of web application and should be developed in a similar way.

The aidan.co.uk site receives around 200,000 page views a month and appears in high positions in Google for a number of keywords. It was relaunched as a database site on 8 October 2003 and has been online continuously since 1997.