John Wragg's Support Blog

For success your website needs qualified traffic, site visitors who will take your desired action. And a large part in generating traffic is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

I recently went by coach to Manchester to spend time with my grown up children, and took with me the 746 page book “Search Engine Optimization for Dummies”, by Bruce Clay and Susan Esparza, experts in the field.

The book is highly recommended, though it is a bit repetitive. I have got up to Page 449, Most of it I “knew”, and it is good to have a reminder and to take it to a deeper level.

I have always done the basics, but doing everything they recommend would double the cost of a website and its ongoing support.

There are some simple measures that you can do “for free”, such as:

1) Know your site audience, objectives and desired outcomes

2) Know the target keywords for each page, and ensure that no two pages have the same title.

3) Make sure the keywords, Titles, Description, Meta Tags and H1 Headers on a page all agree,

4) Create a “Google Profile” for yourself

5) Create a “Google Local” entry for your business

6) Link to and from YouTube, and other social networking sites.

7) Solicit inbound links from quality related websites (not the so called link farms)

There is lots more – see my www.johnwr.co.uk for a fuller treatment, and I could put together a possible package as a service if there is demand for that?

One test is to see who your top competitors are on Google for your chosen keywords and your name, and see what they are doing. Are you willing and able to match them?

[A website can still be valuable as an adjunct to other marketing brochures etc even if it does not rank well.]

Regards

I am now using the Artisteer template generator for most sites. You can generate a wide range of graphical looks, and it works equally for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal (if you get the commercial version).

Demo Sites include:

FindhornLight.org

Johns Support Blog (This site).

Windows 98 is bad news.

Adding software device drivers, say for usb support of a memory stick, can take ages or not be possible (the usb spec was not finalised in time for Windows 98 first edition, and even Windows 98 SE had problems).

Often such machines have a write only CD, so without a working usb port you are stuck.

You can fit a PMCIA broadband wireless adaptor, or Ethernet for a wired connection to a router, if you get lucky with the device drivers.

I once spent 7 hours working on a Windows 98 machine, including:

• Download from Microsoft and install XP Service Pack 2 (90 mins)
• Download from Microsoft and install 48 off security updates for XP SP2 (20 mins)
• Remove obsolete Norton with removal tool
• Installed and then updated AVG anti-virus software
• Scan PC, found 37 infections, 30 spyware programs and 120 warnings
• Clean up and tune performance with Ashampoo Winoptimiser (90 mins)
• Defragment hard disc (30 mins)

and that was before the time and expense of upgrading the memory!

The customer was not well pleased, and we negotiated an arrangement.

So this means that any PC with Windows 98 and older than about 2000 is probably not worth maintaining. Sorry about that.

Except that next time I would like to try Linux Xubuntu, but that is another story and you still need 256 KB minimum.

Low Memory is the most common and critical cause of poor performance on older PCs.

256 KB might have been enough for XP on its own but as more and more startup overheads accumulate the whole system slows down, exhibiting multiple symptoms.

Even with 512 KB you might find that the system slows down when you have more than one application running, even say Word and Internet Explorer.

And for an numeric analysis (say Excel) or graphic manipulation (say Photoshop Elements)  you should really consider 1024 KB or more.

Luckily memory prices have crashed since the days of penny pinching, and you can get 1 GB of SODIMM memory for £43 including shipping, plus a fitting charge if yo need help.

Try

• www.crucial.com or
• www.orcalogic.co.uk/.

So I won’t even look at a machine with only 256 KB without upgrading it first.

I am using this site to evaluate the applicability of WordPress for a relatively staic site of a few pages and an interactive blog.

Pages can be used for static content, tied into a menu via a suitable Theme. And you can set a Home page via Admin | Reading Settings.

There are suppposed to be thousands of WordPress Themes avaialable, but just try and find a suitable one!

My shortlist is:

Artisteer theme generator, also works with Joomla and Drupal
Vigilance – seems OK but would need CSS tweaking
Blix – OK, but see attached Post

Discarded

BluePrint – not updated since 2007
SF BluePrint
Company Website
Cubismo – 2007!
Hybrid
Popular
Salmon – 2007
Deep Blue

The Blix WordPress Theme looks good, but it is not possible to show the Sidebar on Pages such as Home, About, Content…

This might be OK for most Pages, but I would need a sidebar on the static Home Page as an essential part of the navigation.