Web Developers! (Or, those who can code)

[Volpina Vance]

The navigation menu on my website (below) has recently developed a glitch: clicking on a link won't take you to the proffered page. All of my pages are intact - if you add ".php" to any URL, you can view them just fine. I've tried changing attributes within the menu itself but lack knowledge of anything further.

This is how things looked initially (and worked fine! arg):

 <li><a href="about" title="About" class="menu-about">About</a></li>

I've tried the below (and then other spurious things) to no avail:

 <li><a href="http://volpinavance.com/about" title="About" class="menu-about">About</a></li>

I'm also concerned about tampering as this is a recent development. The personal friend who created my website is exploring intercontinental opportunities, and unreachable.

Any help is most welcome. If this is actually something that requires time and effort to fix, I can suitably remit. I've spent far too much time today failing grandly at solving this.

Thank you!

 

[footlong12]

this problem you are having does not have anything to do with your code or coding your website in any way. it happened because something in the way that your webserver is setup has changed something like installing updates or change webhosting companies. if you are using apache 2 as a web server and have access to make changes to the server http://dan.drydog.com/apache2php.html look in step 11.

otherwise you have to change the links from ...href="about" => href="about.php"

 

[shyboy123]

Both of the helpful gents above are right, and this is probably the modrewrite rule/function or .htaccess.

A quick not too techie way to fix this in the short term would be to download the .htaccess file in the root of your website via an FTP program, then edit the file in notepad (or other simple text editor).

You can fix each link by doing a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file that looks like this:

redirect 301 /about http://volpinavance.com/about.php
redirect 301 /gallery1 http://volpinavance.com/gallery1.php
redirect 301 /stats-page1 http://volpinavance.com/stats-page.php
and so on...

It's very likely that the underlying problem that recently caused this will still be an issue and your site may continue to have problems, so you should still get someone to peek under the hood in more detail. Good luck!

 

[Volpina Vance]

Thanks, all!

I had already tried simply adding the ".php" extension, so that's not the issue. I think you're right, footlong, that there have been webserver changes (?! baffled look) but I'm not using Apache. I do use an FTP client, and one of the things I tried yesterday was deleting all of the remote files and uploading the original local version of my site - still no luck.

Shyboy, thanks for the fix! I'll try it and report back.

edit: Site working again, but I don't know if it will last. Just to be sure, I added the ".php" extensions to the full URLs in my menu, and it functions. However, this is how I "fixed" my site yesterday for a whole 10 minutes until the menu links stopped working yet again. Will wait and see.

<li><a href="http://volpinavance.com/about.php" title="About" class="menu-about">About</a></li>

edit#2: Links continue to work. This turned out to be a very easy fix, one that I'd perhaps misapplied the first time. Thanks, DarkRook, for the prompt!

 

[AlexisDVyne]

Hi

I would consider that you get your site professionally redesigned..

Use a content management program so you can easily add or change content and upload images to your gallery..

Possibly something with a calendar and such..

Alternatively.. a basic static php site..

In browsing your site there seem to be other issues there as well..

 

[Smilf]

Your site takes quite a bit of time to load, the first time I looked at it - the galleries were not loading properly and some of your pictures were jumping. Also whomever did your meta tags, only used short keywords and didn't bother using long tail keywords, which are equally important for search engine results. I always recommend people use wordpress for their web sites, because they are easy for you to manage on your own after the web designer has done the basics for you and there are a lot of good plugins you can add to it for better search engine optimization, social media functions, galleries, calendars etc. And even if you have basic tech knowledge, there are literally millions of wordpress templates for sale with yearly memberships starting at $57 for about 300 to choose from - they are not cheap looking at all, are coded well and quite professional looking - just have to know where to look.

 

[Volpina Vance]

Thanks for the specific input. I'm in touch with my webmaster, but probably won't be making changes to the site in the near future. I'm now going to request a halt to general offers of advice - the problem in my original post has been solved.

Smilf, you're right on all points. If I were to disperse my photos into two or three galleries, it probably wouldn't jump or take as long to load. For myself, I find my gallery simply needs a page refresh if it doesn't load correctly, but this is something I've meant to fix for a while. Otherwise, I'm very happy with my template! Thank you for the note about the keywords - please PM me any keyword suggestions.

 

[Smilf]

Actually it really wouldn't matter that much about you breaking up the gallery, what matters is what is being used to function the gallery. Obviously you shouldn't have 100 pictures in each one (I'm exaggerating), but whatever you're using to serve the gallery is what also slows the load times. Have you viewed your site using blackberry? iPhone? Tablets? etc.? I would do so and get some input about how long it takes load using different mobile devices, since over 50% of people are now using them to view your web site. I'll send you some keywords in the morning, long day