I hope you all like the new home of DGB! I spent quite a while (and a bit of money) making sure I chose the right style for the third reincarnation of the site and I think I have done pretty well if I say so myself! The site is the brightest it has ever been and there is far more content displayed than previous versions. So, to make sure you understand all the main bits and bobs of the site, this post is just basically to explain a few things.
Slider
The slider at the top of the home page is one of the main features of the site. This is where all new posts will be displayed in the future. Anything new will go up there. Previously, the old site used to just display the most recent 16 posts. But it did tend to look a bit blocky and 16 posts might have been a bit much. So this time the slider at the top will display the 7 most recent posts.
News Boxes
As I have mentioned in previous posts, the aim of the new site was to be able to cover ongoing topics properly. The previous site didn’t make that easy. With this new one however you can see I have dedicated proper “News Boxes” to let me keep items like Green Deal and CE Marking constantly updated. Any information you might have missed on the subjects you will be able to find in these sections.
As you can see, the sponsors also have one of their own. One of the perks for sponsoring the site!
Tabbed News
If you scroll right to the bottom on the home page you will see a big square box covering 5 subjects. If you have wandered down to the bottom of the page and missed something you wanted to click on, you’ll probably find it there!
Right Hand Side
As per usual you’ll find the search bar and subscription bars at the top right hand corner. Please enter your email address to get my daily content emailed to you! I’m on 162 now, lets see if we can push past 200?!
You’ll also see a little box call “My Experiment”. This contains a link to a survey I have launched to try and work out the national average prices of the products we sell. Please click on the link or here. It only takes two minutes to complete and it only applies to installers of mainly PVCu products.
I have included a nice and neat little widget which allows you to quickly browse through the most popular posts, most recent posts, recent comments and a tag cloud of the most used tags on the site. This is like your quick navigation centre for all the most recent things on the site.
The main site sponsors have their usual ad slots on the right hand side just like on the old DGB. I would like to point out that there are still slots available, to sponsor the site, which comes with promotion and perks both on DGB and the National Fenestration Awards website. There are spaces available specifically for steel, aluminium, timber and glass specialists. If you’re interested, get in touch via the “Contact Me” tab top right.
A new feature I introduced on the old site was the monthly cool wall winners from the National Fenestration Awards Website. I have decided to carry it on on the new site as the winners of these cool walls really are showing some amazing work and deserve to be shown off. If you click the image it will take you to the NFA website.
You next have the Twitter feed from my account so you can keep track of my ramblings. And then there is the usual recent comments section below, with my affiliates below that.
Back To The Top
You will see I have two navigation bars. The first right at the very top displays some of the pages I couldn’t fit on the main navigation bar just below the logo. All my pages are important to me, but I just couldn’t fit all of them in on one bar!
You’ll also see a news ticker. This new theme came with one as part of the package. The slider displays just the last 7 new posts to be published. The news ticker displays the last 15 posts to be published. So if you are looking for a moderately recent post that isn’t on the slider, it should be on the news ticker!
I think that’s about it! There may be the odd little tweak here and there
