Advertising Here

I know it is hard to participate without advertising yourself but I would ask that those who come here to provide a link to their business refrain from doing so. This place is for discussion between professional web designers, not a place to direct traffic to your business web site. Thanks in advance for your restraint.

Loren Bechtum This week I did a study on my lacrosse web design web site. The study was targeted at the SEO value of 4 different styles of navigation on the site. I changed nothing on the page being studied accept the way I created the navigation. SEO software and Expresson Web for that matter recommend that your navigation text be descriptive. The old Home, Service, Contact Us no longer is considered good form. To read on go to www.lacrossewebdesign.com/linkedin.htm

SEO thoughts

First let me say I believe in SEO as a concept. I have been practicing it for years, I think every web master does. Hasn't it always been our aim to get our web sites into the top 10, even 5? That is what SEO is all about. Getting your page listed before your competitions.

Here is were the rub comes. Do a search, in my case I used dairy lab as the keyword. Look at who comes up first. Check out the code source....can you find any keywords? Google keyword search provides just two search waikato milk meter and waikato milk meters. Take a look at the site. Is it attractive, is there any text that draws you to dairy lab? Does their logo have alt tags? Do their links say dairy lab anyplace? No, all this site has going for it is the domain name.

So here is my thought for today. Practice search engine optimization at all times but don't count on it to make you rich. There are obviously other factors that get you to the top.

Google Chrome

Just a note for my students and anybody else out there that is following along. These are not new issues with Chrome but if you are like me you have resisted downloading Chrome until only recently.

Nobody tells you when you start using Chrome that it is not full featured. That is the reason it seems so much faster than Internet Explorer and even Firefox. So what does that mean to someone using it to view web pages? Some of the features built into web pages may not show up for you. To fix this you need to go to the Chrome plugins page and download the features you need.

From a web site creator it means you probably need to put notifications on your web sites telling folks that use Chrome to download the plugin necessary to see all of the cool stuff you have created for the viewer.

My most recent brush with Chrome involves RSS feeds, on of the potentially most useful tools to web site management. The fix for this one can be reached at this address:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd

Personnally, I think it was all just easier when Microsoft controlled 95% of everything!