50,000 Free Wallpapers is now online

Regulars here have probably been wondering where I have been for the past couple of months (though I'm sure some won't have missed me too much in the Political Geeks forum). Well, I have been building my new website: 50,000 FREE WALLPAPERS. It is a place for visitors to find and download wallpapers for their desktop.

It has been a big project. From what was originally a blog hosted by Blogger/Blogspot I have created a fast, framed site with categories including: Female Celebs - Male Celebs - Pop/Rock Groups - Scenery - Space/Astronomy - Cartoons & Anime - Animals - Cars/Transport - Military - Special Occasions - Miscellaneous Wallpapers, & Non-wallpaper Pics.

The site is hosted on its own domain, hosted by 1&1 Web Hosting, who currently have a special deal offering the first 3 months web hosting for free and 2 free domain names for life. The service is very reliable too - over the past 2 months I have experienced only 10 minutes of downtime.

I decided to go with a framed site after numerous reliability problems over a 6 month period with Blogger (they ain't what they used to be Crying or Very sad

). I wanted something quick, where visitors could find the wallpapers they were after without having to wait an eternity for pages to load, or scroll down huge pages with hundreds of thumbnails. Never having designed a framed site before, I downloaded some free frameset templates from TechnoRealm and heavily modified one to suit my purposes.

Getting a framed site indexed on Google can be a bit difficult until I found out I could generate a sitemap and upload it to Google. I found a generator I can run on my Linux machine, but then found a much easier way was to have Free Sitemap Generator create one for me. I just request it through their control panel, they queue the job & then email me when it is completed a few days later. I now have well over 400 pages indexed and that number is increasing every day.

Of course, every site that is frequently updated needs a way to advise people of the latest additions. The best way to do that is by using a blog and RSS feed. But, as I said earlier, I had a lot of problems when using a 3rd-party blog hosting service (Blogger), so I decided to go it alone. I found a great free bit of Perl software: Chronicle : The Blog Compiler which I use to create the blog on my PC and then upload to my domain via FTP. The good thing about it is that it does not use any database, so it can be used on hosts which do not have PHP etc (such as the free space many ISP's offer with their dial-up/broadband accounts). Although the blog creates it's own feed, I do also use FeedBurner as it gives me statistics on the number of feed subscribers, and I can also offer email updates through their service.

The site is ad-supported (sorry guys, but I am on a fixed income and need to pay for my Internet access). However, I have tried to keep ads to a minimum (just 2 per page). To make things easy I use a banner rotator. I found a good free one at: Banner Rotator / HTML Rotator. It uses CGI, so your web host has to have that service available if you want to take advantage of this cool product.

I even designed the site logo myself - I just downloaded some thumbnails of my wallpapers, used an image manipulation program (I think it was The GIMP - I have a few) to combine them in a panoramic view, resized the result, added text & got a good result:

So if you are after some candy for your desktop, why not stop by and check out 50,000 FREE WALLPAPERS? Any feedback would also be appreciated - you can leave a comment in my guestbook which is in the "Contact" section of the site.

Here's a screenshot:

And the links:

50,000 FREE WALLPAPERS (main site)

50,000 Free Wallpapers Updates Blog

50,000 Free Wallpapers Updates RSS Feed

Cheers,

seaeagle

Joined: Mar 11, 2005 Posts: 2356

Are all the wallpaper 1024 x 768?

At the moment - yes (except for the Hubble Space Telescope and a couple of others). That's mainly because my collection was built up over a period of time before I started uploading, and my own PC's screen resolution is 1024x768.

I may add larger resolutions later, but it will take a while as I would have to relocate a lot of the originals on the web, and as many were from newsgroups they are no longer available (though one of my best sources has put up a torrent of all of his 1600x1200 wallpapers - 10 gigs of them).

The site is mainly a "hobby site", and to be honest uploading another 1,000+ galleries would take me around a year to do. But I am seriously thinking of making the effort - I won't be able to provide identical pics to the current galleries as many only came in the one resolution, but I think I could get enough to keep visitors happy.

By the way, you will find lots of different resolution wallpapers if you click the 3 buttons under the "More Free Wallpaper Sites" section at the top left of the site. I will also be adding a links page soon.

Thanks for the feedback zlim.

Cheers,

seaeagle Very Happy

You might to have a look at IrfanView for cropping & resizing (it's free). An alternative which also works on Linux is GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program. Both are simple to use for these tasks.

Thanks Bo! The good news is that I still have lots more Hubble pictures to upload. The site has been a labour of love & a great learning experience. I've learnt about HTML coding, search-engine optimisation, javascript, how to make complex tasks as simple as possible, and lots more. I think I did a pretty good job for my first "real" website. My old sites were either blogs or just a hodge-podge of linked pages. But I feel that this one has a real professional feel to it.

I put navigation and speed as my first priority when I designed the site. Basically, I wanted visitors to be able to quickly get to any section with a minimum of clicks, and never have to use their back button. I looked hard at the sites I have visited, and noted what irritated me most about them. Navigation was the number 1 hassle - the number of sites that don't have the main menu available on every page is astounding.

The other hassle - slow page loads, and having to scroll through long pages of images. So I restricted myself to less than 40 thumbnails per page, and made each page separate, but very easy to get to.

I've certainly learnt there is a lot more to building a website than just sticking up some HTML - design, speed and ease of use is of the utmost importance.