Flat Web Design

If you notice, I have made my helicopter site using flat web design. This means you don't have to drill down and down and down into the site to find information.

All that's needed is to navigate to the site map and click on the helicopter topic you are looking for. Two clicks. One click to find the site map and one click to find the page you want to view. The you can click the back button on your browser (or click on the Site Map link) to get back to the site map.

OR

You might have noticed, if you scroll down to the bottom of each page, the site map is there. The site map is on the bottom of all the HelicopterLinks.com web pages. Actually, depending upon the user, a user might only have to make one click on the site, to find what they are looking for.

Actually, a scroll down first, and then a click.

Just added the Google Translate Tool Bar to the site.

Reality. Web statistics. There are visitors from all over the world visiting my helicopter site. Visitors from almost every country. We had visitors from about 172 countries in 2010. According to Answers.com, there are 196 official countries in the world.

(Reminder: Web statistics are not always accurate. Web statistics are more useful to track trends, not exact numbers.)

In the past, I used to list translation sites at the bottom of every page of the site. Talk about making it difficult for the user! The user had to go to the translation site and copy and paste the URL address of my site, into a translation site and then hoped it worked.

I finally added the Google Translation Tool Bar tonight, to the top right-hand corner of the site. This has been something which has been long overdue. My apologies to anyone who needed translation help and was out of luck.

I hope we can regain past visitors and new visitors by trying to make our site as user friendly as possible.

Going over visitor data from 2010.

When looking at the data from 2010, it looks like just over half of the people visiting my helicopter site are from the Americas, then another great majority visit the site from Europe.

Moving to Asia we see a smaller percentage of visitors. India has to top amount of visitors from Asia (if you want to consider India an official Asian country) followed by Thailand which is followed by China.

This is certainly very interesting information. It's nice to know that people worldwide are using the site.

Updated the header of the site.

Excited about having a good friend of mine, who is an accomplished graphic designer, help me with redesigning the header of the my helicopter site. Also, this weekend, I plan on updating the Site Map and make the categories more relevant to the helicopter industry.

New site uploaded this morning.

I just uploaded my new and expanded helicopter site this morning. Need to advertise? My site has always been search engine optimized and the new pages will be recognized by the search engines in a short while.

Working on the helicopter site.

I am doing the last finishing touches on my helicopter site today. I hope to upload the newest version of HelicopterLinks.com today. Very excited about my goal of having one of the most complete sites about the helicopter industry online.

And once the new site is completed, all helicopter company companies and their vendors are welcome to advertise on HelicopterLinks.com.

Working on the site today.

Working this morning on expanding my helicopter site with the ultimate goal of making it a complete (as complete as humanly possible) directory for the helicopter industry.

Updated main site template this morning.

I revised the main template on my helicopter site this morning. I think my site is more intuitive when navigating it and will be less difficult to get lost on the site.

If I say so myself, I believe my helicopter site is the only helicopter site in the world with a complete list of turbine, factory ready, helicopter manufacturers in the world, listed on one page.

I hope this is a true statement. I personally have never found a site with a list of helicopter manufactures as complete as mine, on my helicopter site.

IE and Firefox.

Browsers. Ugh. Too bad they work differently. The people who are mostly stressed about how browsers render websites are the webmasters. Internet Explorer (IE) has caused problems for my helicopter site. I typically use Firefox and design for Firefox. However, I recently worked out the bugs that Internet Explorer was causing.

I'm pleased that the main page, the helicopter manufacturer page, now looks as intended in Internet Explorer. I apologize to all of you who use IE and have seen some text which should not have been centered and the sentences had bad vertical spacing.

I hope you enjoy the helicopter site and please let me know of any helicopter trade shows or air shows which I have not listed. Thanks.

Boeing Website Error Page

I was checking all the links in January on my helicopter site and was sad to find that Boeing's website link to their rotorcraft systems section is broken. On the home page of my helicopter site I feature helicopter manufacturers from around the world. It's surprising to me that a major helicopter manufacturer like Boeing would allow their rotorcraft systems link to be broken for such a long time.

I first discovered their link being broken in January of 2011. Who knows how long the link has been broken? I sent Boeing an email concerning this issue in January with no response back to me. Not sure why.