Starting to re-design ExploreNorth
Working with a website that’s almost 25 years old can be frustrating, and it’s pretty much constantly on my mind to do something about the design. The challenge – and it’s a huge challenge – is that there are over 31,000 files making up over 5,000 individual pages, and being built with hand-coded html, there’s no global way to make changes.
Over the past few months I’ve been pecking away at removing ads from the site. Today I came to this page, which gets a substantial amount of traffic as it’s the home base for a lot of information. Google Ads have simply gotten too greedy as they desperately try to get people to click on the ads. That affects the experience of my readers in a substantial way, and the revenue I get from the ads is no longer enough to justify that negative experience.
The ads are now gone from that page (and a few dozen others as of this evening).
I’m creating many new pages every week now that it’s cold outside and the days are short. I created this one this afternoon to tie together some hiking information, and the very old-looking design really bugged me, so I decided to play with it.
It needs a proper navigation bar, but this feels much better. I’ll see how I feel about it in a couple of days before continuing down this path…
On a large screen, it has a nice calm green background. On a phone, the page is far easier to read.
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