New Excel Program, Design Changes, & More
Hey there, Couch Trippers! We’ve got some more exciting updates to announce! Read our October Site News update below to learn more about our new Excel Basics tutorial program, some slight design changes we’ve made to the website to make the articles more pleasant, and more.
-
Aerl & Earl is owned and operated by a separate entity with close affiliations to CouchTripping.com. The views expressed by Aerl & Earl do not necessarily represent the views of Couch Tripping. Couch Tripping does not receive direct compensation for any sales or advertisements placed with or on behalf of Aerl & Earl.
Products and services that appear on CouchTripping.com may be from companies from which we receive compensation. Affiliated links allow us to earn revenue as an Amazon Associate. All available product choices may not be included, and we carefully consider the terms/rules of how products may be displayed or advertised at all times.
Products are reviewed fairly and objectively based on customer satisfaction, price, competition, features, and a number of other factors as well. Any ratings that may appear are based on the opinion of CouchTripping.com and its staff in good faith to provide the best product options for the described needs/scenario.
Hey everyone, Charles here! A lot has happened since the last Site News update, and we’ve got some exciting new things to announce going forward.
We’re now officially past the first month mark of Couch Tripping’s launch! I am so proud of how it’s turned out so far, and I am extremely grateful to the support shown by my close circle for my silly little website. Every share, every screenshot, and every moment taken out of your already busy lives means the world to me, and I hope to keep this site going for a long time in the foreseeable future.
Including this article, we have now reached about eighteen (18) different articles posted onto Couch Tripping. For the first month or so, I would say that this is a pretty good pace we’ve set so far. Given that I started writing articles a little before the official launch of the site, this puts us at an average rate of approximately 2.5 days per article, which is much faster than I was targeting!
Some articles, such as the lengthier ones in the Road Trip w/ Charlie series, take longer to write (sometimes up to a week), but I am hoping that the variety of content can make up for some of these longer durations between articles. We’ll see if we can keep up the current output pace, but I’m optimistic.
And with that being said, that brings us to our first announcement of the day: the new Excel Basics tutorial program!
In this program, I hope to teach readers more about Microsoft Excel, empowering them to feel knowledgeable and capable enough to add more complex functionality into their spreadsheets, making their lives easier when tracking or building different tools.
Having used Microsoft Excel extensively throughout my professional career, I believe I can bring a unique perspective to these tutorials, giving readers advice that favors function and teaches them what they would need to know in order to replicate their results for a different application.
To give an idea of what this program will look like, I have written a couple of articles to help kick us off! In these guides, we will go over some sample examples, offering downloadable test files if you want to follow along on your own. Going step-by-step, we will show you how to perform each tutorial topic.
These first Excel guides deal specifically with creating drop-down lists. The first installment deals with basic information on how to create a drop-down menu, and the second installment shows you how to use this information to create a dynamic drop-down menu that changes based on other information. Feel free to check them out!
I’m still working to find a balance for how often to update Couch Tripping’s ongoing article series without neglecting our other content categories. I don’t want the site to feel too weighted towards certain topics over having a good variety, but this may result in longer intervals between updates. I like sprinkling in articles that cover a wide range, like our Aerl & Earl product showcase article, and I don’t see us straying too far away from that strategy for the foreseeable future. More to come on this as I continue to give it more thought.
Aside from that though, we also have some slight design changes to announce for Couch Tripping!
You may have noticed at the top of this article that the article title is much smaller. That is intentional!
Truth be told, I wasn’t a huge fan of how big the article titles were on the screen, taking up much of the screen’s real estate before the first scroll-down. I wanted to change it from the beginning, but I wasn’t quite sure how until now. I will fully admit that I am still a website-building novice, and I hope that you will bear with me as I stumble through this thing!
I think the article titles look much better now, but feel free to let me know through our various channels if you feel differently. I imagine there will be some more slight design tweaks here and there before I am fully happy with the way that things look on the site, and I am already targeting my next change: the All Articles page on mobile.
If you look at the All Articles page on desktop, it looks mostly fine. The content may still be slightly too big, which I might play around with, but on mobile, the layout looks very cumbersome. I hope to figure out how to make this page look better on mobile soon, but in the meantime, I encourage you navigate between these articles on mobile from the home page or the other “See All” pages for the various categories.
If you want to see an example of the size changes for the article titles, feel free to check out my personal account of seeing the Northern Lights in the Chicagoland area earlier this month. This is how the article titles looked before:
Old Title Size for Comparison
You can look at the top of this article or the Northern Lights article to compare. It’s a slight difference in the grand scheme of things, but I like it and thought it was worth a mention for those that may have been turned off by it before.
For some other miscellaneous news, we are now fully searchable in Bing! Combined with Couch Tripping’s efforts to remain up-to-date and searchable on Google, Bing now crawls and indexes our articles regularly as well. Apparently, DuckDuckGo searches work now too, which I only noticed by looking at the site’s search analytics.
Maintenance on Bing will not be as regular for the time being, but I will work on getting things looking better on there at some point soon.
For some news on the affiliate side, it looks like an order has been placed via Amazon for a product linked in one of our articles! As part of the Amazon Associates Program, things like this really help support the ongoing efforts of Couch Tripping, and I am very appreciative of the thought and contribution.
And that about wraps it up for this update! Thank you for sticking with us, and I hope to see you all again here soon!
