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.

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.

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.