One hundred posts at MadelineDyer.com

Yes, this post is the 100th post at MadelineDyer.com so today we’re going to take a look back at all that we’ve achieved.

A brief history of the site:

Ok, so I started this website about 5 years ago (around 2004/5) but it looked completely different then. In fact I first started thinking about making my own webite because my brother already had a successful one and my dad also had many!

The very first ‘phase’ of my website was initially designed on my Windows 95 computer and only incorporated a section on horses. Making every single page took hours then as I really had no idea how do to it. Luckily my Dad and brother were able to show me how to do it! About a year or so after this my website gained a new look which made it look slightly more modern – this version is still on the web so here’s the link. I think you’ll agree the site looks more sophisticated now than then!

At that time I had very little information on my site and of course it only covered horses and ponies. About a year after that I decided I wanted to include other sections about different animals. The home page was origionally the indroductory page for horses so this horse page got a new URL so the home page could be adapted to suit many animals. Unfortunately I can’t show you what this page looked like as in August 2009 I upgraded to WordPress which ‘took over’ the home page.

After August 2009 I kind of lost interest in my website and it was only in April 2010 when I put the first post of the new site up, a page about my pets in general, as well as editing the home page. I then proceeded to write a post about each of my pets that I’ve had.

Since then I have made several more posts each month; I try to aim for a minimum of 5 per month. The animals covered in the posts range from Alpacas to Siberian Tigers, Giant African Land Snails to domestic cats, guinea pigs and rabbits.

It wasn’t until the 25th July 2010 that I changed the theme to a more sophisticated-looking one that matched the needs of my website more. This became known as ‘phase two’ and is how the website looks now.

Another change that happened towards the end of July 2010 was that I started putting way more pictures and photos on the site to ‘liven it up’. Both my parents and my brother took many pictures of animals for me that I now have on my website!

Now I feel more happy with my website and even have articles that are by guest authors.

Problems I encountered:

When you do anything you’re always likely to come accross problems; my website was no different.

One of the main difficulties I had at first was getting people to visit my site. It’s all very well to make a website but what’s the point if nobody sees your hard work? Luckily as more pages went up, so did the traffic; I also linked to it from my Youtube channel ‘MadOnAnimals’ where I had posted and still post several videos about animals, mainly my pets.

My Dad suggested that it may be more interesting for people to read about my expreinces with animals rather than reading the information pages that somewhat resemble the infor you’d find in an encyclopedia, so I set up the Category ‘My Animal Blog’ where I write about the most exciting animal related things that have happened to me.

My most recent problem was deciding how I should categorize the posts. When I started ‘phase two’ I had posts about my pets and posts on caring for giant african land snails as well as posts on wild animals. The articles about my animals were in a category called ‘My Pets’ with subcategories for the individual animals. The articles on the snails were in the ‘Giant land snail’ category with subcategories for ‘care’, ‘information’ and ‘species’ e.t.c. I soon realised that if I were to use that category ‘formation’ for all the animal species that I wrote about I’d end up with loads of categories – and anyway what can you write about for ‘Deer Care’?

After discussing my problem it soon came clear that in a way I was mixing up two different categorisation systems; one for pets and information on them, and the other being information on wild animals.

In the end I decided to combine the two systems. For animals which are often kept as pets there would be a category specifically for that animal, with sub-categories for ‘care’, ‘medical information’ e.t.c. For the posts about wild animals I would have a category for the family and then sub-categories for the species that are part of that family. For example I have a category called ‘Squirrels’ then some of the sub-categories are ‘Prairie dogs’, ‘ground squirrels’ and ‘tree squirrels’. Similarly posts on Alpacas are in their own sub-category under the category ‘Camels’ as they belong to the camel family. Ok, so I realise this doesn’t always work as alpacas are often pets, yet there isn’t an ‘alpaca care’ sub-category, but if I did this for all the animals kept as pets they’d be hundreds of categories.

What I like about my website is that there is a search box, so people can simply seach for what they are looking for or look through the categories.

My Favourite Images

These images below are all photos that I or my family have taken. There are also an image that I have drawn myself.