Whoa, I'm channeling Dickens.
When I first introduced the site to several webmasters, they had such wonderful things to say about it:
I appreciate the words of encouragement which have been so generously provided by those webmasters.
But what is it with this idea of a CargoShip and what is that about it being a prototype?
Some thought the idea of building a site, even going so far as to getting it its own domain, for the purpose of being a test site was a little bonkers.
The sites I have designed in the past have been primarily portals, turnkey sites (I am including adult sites in that category) or sites aimed at a specific interest. I have, though, never designed my own personal site which encompasses my different interests. Being that I, like all of us essentially, have different interests, this would cover quite a diverse ground of subject matter and would not necessarily lend itself well to an organized site theme; that is, unless the theme of the site specifically called for diversity.
I had my idea for a site, based on a movie theme, which lent itself well to diversity. There were several things I wanted to do with it which would add to the experience of the viewer, provide user friendliness in its navigation, and have several features which were unique to it and would bring back visitors (pretty much what we all want to do with our sites).
The problem was that there were several complex design elements with which I have never worked, I needed to organize my material and work on new material specifically for the site, and not having an internet connection at the time was a hurdle (ya think). The solution, as I saw it anyway, was to design a much simpler site which incorporated some of the basic elements I wanted to use, and then to experiment with it by tweaking it and adding new elements to see how well they worked and if they contributed or detracted from the navigation of the site. Not to mention that since I was considering using frames, I wanted to experiment with some techniques which would make the site more search engine friendly.
The result was Zhorkow's CargoShip. I based the CargoShip design on a Zymic template I had, but I did not care for the heavy graphics or the small window for the frame; so I basically re-created the template with out using any graphics and increasing the size a little. It was, however, designed to fit a screen size of 800x600 without requiring too much scrolling while still filling plenty of the screen on a computer with a 1024x768 resolution. The reason primarily for this is, as my laptop was stolen, and I didn't have my own internet access, I was limited to borrowing a connection using an old Pentium 1 laptop which has a screen resolution of 800x600.
The site was designed entirely offline; which was an odd thing to do with a site which uses remote content, but being without internet access left me with no choice. I was able, when I occasionally used someone else's computer, to grab links to remotely hosted content, save it to text file, then paste it into my pages offline; without the benfit of being able to view it. When I did finally get the site uploaded, much to my horror, most of the remote content did not work and I scrambled for content to add. Of course, to add insult to injury, the file hosting service which I was using to store files decided to pull something scummy and start redirecting people who click on a link to download a file to page after page of ads rather than just let them download the file; so my downloads were disabled as well.
Ah, but just some bugs to overcome.
When I did get a number of bugs worked out (I still had a few pages I forgot to link and some dead links as well), I decided to post some links to it for feedback purposes.
Have you ever noticed how, no matter how boldly you state or write something, there are those who will only read what they want to read, whether you wrote it or not?
The term 'prototype' did not register with many. Several apparently felt that I was not aware that I had used frames. But the most common feedback was on the appearance of the site; regardless of how many times I had stated up front, and in replies as well, that I did not care about the look of the site, I was concerned with the mechanics and the SEO of the site. Of course, I have done some things to improve the overall look, primary of which was to get rid of the logo which was the most universally hated part of the site.
The site is a learning experience as I had intended. I am integrating a few minor things into it and learning new things to overcome some of its weaknesses; albeit, this is a slow process, but I feel it will be worth it in the long run.
One of the things I had implemented, which I was going to use with the new site before I designed the CargoShip, is a scrolling text file on the page which can easily be crawled by the search engines. It contains keywords from many of the pages on the site. It is presently over 600 words long in content. In order to prevent it from being considered as hidden text, the top line in it also serves as the welcome message to the site; since I got rid of my logo.
There are some promotion techniques I am trying with the site as well to see how well they work, and if they produce any negative results or not. (not all of the alt tags on the page are obvious)
Yes, I have quite liberally used the terms prototype and experiment to describe the CargoShip. This, however, does not in any way lessen the importance of this site as its primary function is, regardless of any design function, is to provide a fun place for all of you to visit, and, in order to make it so, I have to keep adding to it and improving it where I can.
Several projects are in the works for this site, and new ones will come along once those are completed. This all works well with the CargoShip premise: there is no telling what you may find laying around in the CargoShip