I did it, got in this final post before the end of 2008! Earlier this month, launched visitMalaysia.in and visitMalaysia.cn, both of which are now sporting snazzy new templates.
Overall, it’s been a pretty good year for visitEarth, with steady traffic and revenue growth, hopefully providing a good springboard for the new year. Unfortunately, the stock markets have been far less kind, but here’s to a far more prosperous and stable 2009.
Happy New Year!
Bryan
Okay, did it! I’ve now changed the design, layout and structure for both the Indian and Chinese site templates. Examples can be found at Galapagos.in and Galapagos.cn. In additional to being a more open design and calling greater attention to the image representing each country, there’s also additional information for local times and a welcome message – all while taking up less important vertical space.
On a more technical note, I’ve condensed multiple different function calls for things like weather, photo links, currency exchange and related links into one single function, which has seemed to speed up the rendering time. Also made a few minor formatting and navigational touch-ups here and there. I still have work to do to deploy this template across other common pages like landing pages, contact pages and TravelPhotos.in and TravelPhotos.cn – but that will all happen likely in the new year.
I’ll try to post a final message tomorrow, the last day of 2008. Just in case I don’t, here’s to a healthy and hopefully more prosperous 2009…
Cheers!
Bryan
Okay, reworked a new template design as a test, and will sit on it for a day or so before applying it site-wide. The first iteration is on TravelVideos.in and TravelVideos.cn
Ironically, they are inspired by a mistake I made a few weeks ago, when I had the wrong style sheet reference, so had what seemed to be garbage appear – but I thought the end result looked really cool! I’ll stare at them for maybe another day or two in action, and make sure I’m happy with them before I make changes to all of visitEarth.asia
I’ll also have more geeky-oriented thoughts in a few days regarding how I’m handling multiple travel sites on the same server, and trying to be efficient with my php function calls 
Cheers!
Bryan
