Fiddling around the edges

Hello. How have you been?

I know, it’s been a while. That’s probably my fault.

Anyway, although it might not look like much has changed, much has changed. Well, is changing.

Aston Villa Central

AVC has a brand new logo. It’s something I’ve played with now & again for quite a while, but recently decided to put some effort into finishing and I’m very happy with the result. It’s both instantly more recognisable as being related to Aston Villa Football Club and distinctly identifiable as belonging to the Aston Villa Central “brand”.

One small hitch though. It won’t simply drop into the current site layout and the design requires some tweaks to accommodate it. “Some tweaks” have lead to some significant changes and, long story short, it’s going to take a little while before I can “go live”.

But that’s actually okay, for reasons that will hopefully become clear should I hit my target date, I’m actually aiming to migrate to the new logo on May 2nd.

I’ve been compiling a list of places around the web where I use the logo so that I can produce versions in each relevant size and, in some cases, customized versions. I’ve recently seen such places as Facebook and Twitter referred to as “embassies” – a term I’m pretty fond of – so it’s obviously very important to ensure there is a consistent look across all the sites.

There’s actually a fair bit of work to get through and I haven’t even begun an infographic that was already scheduled for the same date. Again, the significance of the date will become clear if I get it done on time.

Speaking of infographics, I’m currently working on turning this Tweet into something with graphical loveliness.

But I digress. Tick tock, tick tock.

footballURLs

fURLs has had a minor spruce up, the main change being the ‘Blogs and News Feeds’ menu bar moving from grey to black. I know, ground breaking stuff.

I’ve also managed to finally take advantage of WordPress 3′s custom menu functionality; firstly replacing the ‘Extras’ menu, but secondly the ‘Blogs and News Feeds’. It was super easy to code it into the theme and now allows complete control of the menus from the dashboard and also meant I could delete a plug-in I was using to exclude certain pages from the menus.

Now new pages forming part of the ‘Extras’ section can be added on an ad hoc basis without any need to hard code anything. So far, I’ve started adding pages that pull latest league tables from Soccerway using an iframe widget.

It could well be SEO suicide though. There are currently 20 pages, one for each of Europe’s top ranked countries, each one featuring at least two tables. That’s dozens of links back to Soccerway, but the content isn’t actually seen by the spiders as it’s displayed on the page within an iframe.

We’ll see how it goes, but I’ve a feeling the site will end up little more than a toy for me to experiment with. The next step is to continue expanding the ‘Extras’ section – I want to include live scores and possibly betting links next – and then to construct a new landing page to help direct visitors to what’s currently available.

From there… well, there’s still a long, long way to go.