Isnt This Lovely and Swish?

Do you like the new blog design? I've been tinkering.

The older design on this site was really funky and swish but it wasn't google friendly, web archivers gave up with it completely. The world of search engines just wasn't ready for a fully ajax site.

When I redesigned it a few months ago I was really unhappy with the layout but Google loved it and gave me a page rank of 4, and now i'm waiting for the next page rank update to see how much of that trickles down into the rest of the site.

The old Banshee site managed a page rank of 6 at one time, and the STCC project also accrued some, but I wasted the potential with both of these projects when I lost interest and moved on to other things.

So this time i'm determined not to waste it and shall grow the site, but I had to do something about the blog design and the homepage!

So here you can see my swish new blog, I almost coded article comments yesterday but I never got around to it so you'll have to wait a while longer before you can insult me in your replies. At some point I need to do an RSS feed to automate the mailouts of new articles - i'm sending them periodically at the moment by hand and that's ok for now.

I've redone the homepage too, there are 6 new Bekka comics on the header image which cycle - but the homepage is not final yet. I want it to have some dynamic content but I have serious reservations about the best way to achieve this for Google.

I don't want to duplicate content from deeper within the site but I do want to show the latest updates. The duplicate content issue is one that bothers me greatly, Google hates it, and the tool given to web developers to rectify it is designed for a whole page of duplicated content and not one that links to numerous other pages. I also fear making a change that will kill the current rank on the page before it has trickled down to other areas of my site.

There is still more to do, i'm missing some of the basics like page meta titles & descriptions. I've the opportunity to seperate out the css into cachable files for faster page loading and I need to find inspiration for how to tackle the menu on the Poetry & Software pages to keep things in the sites style whilst allowing those pages their own creative presentation.

The conclusion one draws from this is that a web developers job is never finished, and never is this more true than the site that really matters - their own.

After all you would think the first place customers would look is my own site? Yet my customers have awesome sites that are fully finished whilst I have a half written site with double the page rank.

Maybe when this site is fully finished it'll rank even better? I wonder if i'll ever finish it.

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