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, 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 usesd 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.

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.