Lately it seems everyone I know is interested in window blinds and shades. A good friend has established a site on bamboo blinds that I helped out with out, mainly aesthetics, programming and SEO.

And then most recently my Mom has decided she loves Hunter Douglas blinds so much she wants to review them!  Many of her friends have purchased Hunter Douglas window treatments, so I guess it’s quite easy for her to get hands-on with these and talk to people who have them in their homes. And while she is about it she can grab some good pics as well!

So I helped out with the design of Bamboo Blinds as mentioned, my good friend Violeta has written all the reviews and information for the site – I designed the Joomla template, which incidentally will be released over on Joomlabear shortly under the title “Notebook Template”.

The site is built on the Joomla Content Management System and also used the K2 Extension which provides a lot of additional options for organizing and formatting Joomla content. One example is Tags, something Wordpress does out of the box but which Joomla is sadly lacking at this point.

K2 bridges this weakness and we can see an example of a K2 Tags page here: Bamboo Blinds for Sliding Glass Doors. The benefits of tagging are definitely worth the additional effort – Search Engines love them and users love them too – Tags provide a great way to organize and explore content.

The last thing I wanted to mention in today’s rambling post is my Mom’s site on Hunter Douglas Blinds. This is built with Wordpress and is just a skeleton currently, but I like to work this way when designing because it gives me some  text based content to work with, really useful to get a feel for how the site will behave with images, long pages, etc. I also like to get my Wordpress optimization sorted out first because it gives us a head-start in the search engines

I can spend weeks tweaking a layout until I’m happy with it – but it’s always good to remember search engines don’t look at all that fancy design stuff – they read the text and make an assessment of  what your site offers from this – so if the copy is on hand it’s very good to get this up immediately and then refine the layout as you go.

My next post will actually step you through my Wordpress setup and optimization process so you can see exactly what I do.

Until then.

I have two relatively new recipe websites that Google is not playing nice with – I’m really not sure what the issue is but am considering fileing a reconsideration request from Google webmaster tools.

The first site is http://easyrecipecooking.com, A domain name I mentioned a couple of posts back – a week or so on and it still is not appearing in Google’s index.

I have verified in webmaster tools and also added a site map which has been submitted to Google – the site has been online for a month or so. The issue with this domain is that it was an expired domain name and I don;t know what the previous owner used it for… hopefully nothing evil.

The second domain name is free vegetarian recipes, This one is at least popping in and out of the search engine results pages, but is not at all stable – the domain was ranking 3rd for “Free Vegetarian Recipes” when it was purchased but has slid backwards since.

I’ll be keeping an eye on these and will post a progress report. Any thoughts you care to leave in the comments are appreciated.

My friend Violeta has whipped up another delicious masterpiece and I’m thinking of cooking this for dinner.

She calls it a healthy dinner recipe and it consists of grilled chicken and yellow beans.

Mouthwatering….

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My good friend Violeta has overhauled her website Tips and Tricks. She’s used the Thematic theme by Ian Stewart from ThemeShaper, a Wordpress theme I am very impressed with. At present Violeta has been working on the layout and placing modules to display “Recent Tips”, etc.

Already the site has a clean and minimalist feel that reminds me of the design used over at the NY Times. Thematic theme has really nice typography out of the box and makes for a very ‘readable’ blog.

As I understand it, Violeta’s intention is to customise the header in due course, and add a little colour and style. Thematic also makes this very easy if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty and diving into a little HTML and CSS.

Thematic is also a very well search engine optimised theme, with H1 tags for your blog description on the home page, but H1 applied to post titles on post pages – sexy! There are some other quite advanced SEO things happening under the hood, and it will be interesting to get a report from Violeta on the search engine performance of Tips and Tricks a month or so from now.

In summary I really like what Violeta has done and I think the Thematic Wordpress theme framework is a great starting point for developing a new look for your Wordpress powered site!

Just uploaded my first Youtube Video – a quick tutorial showing how to backup your wordpress database before backing up.

Hope you find this useful

I’ve setup a new site recently with my friend Violeta from All Tips and Tricks, it’s called Easy Recipes.

The site is built on Wordpress and provides a nice selection of tasty, yet easy to prepare recipes.

The problem is that the site has been up now for about 3 weeks and is still not appearing in Google’s index. It’s very strange because usually I find Google picks up new sites in a matter of days.

I’ve added a Sitemap and submitted this via Google’s webmaster tools but still no luck.

The domain does have history in the Wayback machine – and the history displayed is good – however I am now wondering if the site has been used by a more recent owner for some negative purpose and possibly is now being penalised by Google. The Wayback machine does not show the most recent year of history so this period is unknown.

I’m hoping with a link from my own personal blog that Google may come to its senses – if not I will have to file for a reconsideration request.

If anyone else has tips on rapid indexing, or overcoming penalties in Google – I would love to hear about them in the comments below.

About a year ago I put up a site to test out a number of search engine algorithm theories I had. The site is http://stars-without-makeup.info/ and focuses on celebrities or stars without makeup.

The site has never had a huge amount of traffic, and has not ranked highly in any of the engines until recently it moved to #3 and then #2 in Yahoo. Surprisingly this netted between 900 and 1000 visitors per day for a brief period, but just as suddenly as these rankings were bestowed they were gone! Yahoo now ranks the site at 49th and this change occurred overnight.

Why is this?

I’ll be pondering this question and will let you know what happens. I’m looking at content, backlinks and a number of other factors.

A very good friend of mine has a beautiful cat, the breed is Russian Blue.
We were talking about her cat recently and it emerged she is part of a larger network of people who love and collect Russian Blues in Europe.

This friend is also a web designer and has built a really cute website for the cattery and Russian blue community.
Take a look: http://www.cendre-de-roses.ro/

If you were interested in buying a Russian Blue they are apparently very smart and good natured pets, and come highly recommended. The Cattery currently has Russian Blue kittens for sale, but get in quick as stock is limited!

I must say the kittens are unbelievably small and cute! Who could resist one of these!

Norman Sheppard has a good tip today that shows you what to do if Dreamweaver suddenly stops working. It’s a Dreamweaver bug.

This has happened to me on a number of occasions – and has always puzzled me. Working away in Dreamweaver and suddenly it dies – It won’t open again except for a few seconds when my workspace flashes before me and then vanishes.

My resolution was this  – I deduced that it was the site directory that I was currently working in that had caused issues (Yes didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out).

1. So I renamed the directory
2. then created a new directory
3. Dreamweaver then opened
4. and I downloaded all my files again off the live server….

Now I know what really happened – as Norman explains what causes Dreamweaver to stop working is when a file in your site is exactly 8,192 bytes, or a multiple of this number. The fix is to find the file and just add a few characters to it, using notepad for example – then Dreamweaver will open again.

Read the full story at the link above. Interesting

I’ve found that using dofollow for all links in Wordpress comments is generally not good because it attracts unmanageable amounts of spam – basically spammers use bots (scripts, automated programs) to surf the web looking for dofollow blogs. When they find them they come and personally leave spammy comments hoping that the author will approve them. Yes spammers automate spam commenting too – but these are easier to pick up because they are generally less relevant to the content.

What has bugged me about this is that if I reply in my own blog comments then any URL is also nofollowed. Thsi bothers me because I quite often link out to other sites in response to users questions and I don’t want these links to be nofollowed – I’m writing teh comment, I’m placing teh link, so why shouldn’t be considered by Google to be a dofollow editorial link?

The solution to this problem is an excellent little wordpress plugin http://www.everfluxx.com/follow-my-links/

This provides dofollow links for the authors posts. Just what I wanted.