Finally its done.  The Trails has a whole new look of its very own and some new functionality as well.

BKDesign handled the Template and Coding for me and did an amazing job.  I’ve always wanted a design that was mine from the very first moment that I set up this site so was never completely happy with my mangled efforts of creating the templates myself, imagine me shuddering right now, or the free templates available since every Tom, John and Jane on the web not so surprisingly has the same templates.  He also handled the coding for the site and fixed up a lot of things for me, including the mapping function, video page and gallery.  While I’ve had those things for awhile they were not working all that well particularly the map thing!

So the Gallery page has been redone and has a new look.  It now incorporates a manual photo gallery as well for those of you who complained that your connections speeds were too low to view the slideshow.

The new mapping function is incorporated into the Journal and also hooked into the Country Category system so in future trips it will map the trip for me as well.  For journal entries that are mapped there will be a link to the map on the left hand side of the Journal entry.  At the moment there are only a few entries mapped from my last trip, mainly to test the system.  The true test will be on the next trip which is to Egypt next year.

Also the Video system has been given a tweak as well.  I will be entering the video’s on the appropriate Journal entries so they will now appear not only on the Video page but also from the Journal and they can be watched from either.  The advantage of it being hooked into the Journal as well is that as the site grows with more content, particularly for my RTW it can be organised easier.  Now I know that’s more my end but hopefully it will make the content easier to find on the views/readers end as well.  A couple more videos will appear in the next month or so from the Thailand trip.  The editing is done its more the music for the background that I have to work on!

So I’m all excited about the new look.  So have a look around and let me know what you think!