My website

TKDLady · 01-06-2006, 10:45 AM

I have a website that I put together for my old neighborhood because all the men liked fixing things and building things. So we started taking pictures of the before, during and after for our projects and I started putting them together to share with just my neighbors. Now I want to expand and have people be able to search for it. I have changed it quite a bit since its inception and have added links to this site and others that are my favorites. How can I get the search engines to recognize it? I am very novice at web page making. I don't know how to write html or any other web authoring code. I use Front Page because of its ease.

I am going for the big points here, if you haven't guessed. I am still pretty low on the totem pole and want to move up. What do you think Duke?

If you are interested in looking at my feeble attempt go to: http://members.cox.net/tkdlady

:whatscookin:

Merika · 01-06-2006, 04:55 PM

Oh WOW tklady...that is a really NICELY put together website. Loved the music and the great pics!

Duke is always so great at welcoming websites within our community. The cool part about yours is that it's totally different than anything we've ever had to offer our members/visitors. People are SO into upgrading their homes and yard on their own these days. It would be wonderful to have a link like that we could get information from!!! I, for one, am EXTEMELY interested! I'm redoing my whole deck area this spring and the pics you had posted just gave me some new ideas.

Thanks so much for sharing your site! I've bookmarked it already.

Again....THANKS!

PS...Can we join the site even though we aren't from the neighborhood?

Duke · 01-06-2006, 05:06 PM

I hope you don't mind but I thought I'd split the topic since some or most of this conversation may end up being gibberish.

I have a few questions for you before I start preaching my wisdom

1) How long has your site been online?
2) What is your current, and future plans for the site?
3) What audience are you targeting?
4) What words best describe your site and/or it's content?
5) Are you willing to add new content on a very regular basis and/or news?

These are just off the top of my head but they are thoughts you should ponder carefully as they will have a direct impact on how your site performs.

TKDLady · 01-06-2006, 05:50 PM

Thank you for the nice words Merika. There isn't really anything to join. It started out as a joke actually, a fun way to tell each other what projects we wanted done and when. Some of the people involved weren't in our neighborhood. They are friends who needed/wanted things done and we all pitched in to do them.

To answer some of your questions Duke, I don't have any big plans for it I guess. I just thought it would be nice to have other people be able to see what they can do without professionals. We have a lot of construction going on around here and it is very hard to get contractors to come and do the onsy twosy jobs. I guess I have had the site for about 5 or 6 years. There was a period where nothing was done on the site, a few projects were done and not logged. Then I started doing it again and wanted to make it more like a real website. Kind of a therapy for me I guess. I wasn't planning on spending money on it and since it is through my online service my space is limited. I can have upto 7 mail boxes and each one can have 10MB of personal web space which can be combined somehow. I only use one account so only have 10M and it is almost full. I wasn't planning an making it commercial at all. News links might be nice. I guess I really hadn't thought about it. Like I said I am a novice and am just doing this for fun and therapy.

Duke · 01-06-2006, 09:46 PM

The reason I ask is that its really difficult to create a flourishing website unless you have new (and preferably original) fresh site content added to your site, daily if posible. A stagnant site is likely to be visited by a search spider now and again but your site currently doesn't even tell the search robots what to do I'm afraid.

I can give you a lot of tips and tricks on how to gain site popularity and importance with google and the other search engines but everything is a rather involved and very time consuming process. I've logged at least 1000 hours on Lifesupporters.net (alone) since its creation and have still only reached a google site importance rating of 5 out of 10 (it used to be 6 of 10) and recieve less than 100 unique page views per day.

I guess thats not bad considering that this site was only created in July 2003 but it gives you an idea of the commitment needed to gain even this limited amount of success.

A few things that can help you is to:

- download the google toolbar and be sure to enable page ranking:
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...google+toolbar
- find sites that match your theme and ask for reciprocal link exchanges with them.
- close down the webmail so you can use that saved space on your website and add as much fresh content as you possibly can.
- add robots text (I can show you how to do this).

Of course there is much, much more but it won't help you much if you don't at least do the above steps first.

If you need any help, please let me know.

TKDLady · 01-06-2006, 10:15 PM

Thanks for the tips. Like I said it is mostly a neighborhood thing. I wasn't looking for a lot of hits or anything. It just seemed useless to put links on it if the only people looking at are my neighbors and even they don't look too often anymore.

I guess I will think about what I really want to do and if I decide to make a more active site or come up with a different theme I will ask then what to do.

Thanks.

Duke · 01-07-2006, 12:38 AM

The links aren't so much for your viewers to visit, there more there to attain page rank. The more "like-minded" sites you link to that link back to your site, the better. That's whats known as reciprocal link exchanges and it's likely the primary reason that Lifesupporters grew from PR 0 of 10 to PR 2, then 4, then 6 inside of 8 months.

Of course all of my webhosting woes have only served to damage my sites popularity which is why we've fallen somewhat stagnant. Finding a new webhost will not only help our page loading and site error issues, it will also put lifesupporters.com pointing back to this site as it should be and hopefully the PR and traffic will increase as well.

Merika · 01-17-2006, 09:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tkdlady

Thanks for the tips. Like I said it is mostly a neighborhood thing. I wasn't looking for a lot of hits or anything. It just seemed useless to put links on it if the only people looking at are my neighbors and even they don't look too often anymore.

I guess I will think about what I really want to do and if I decide to make a more active site or come up with a different theme I will ask then what to do.

Thanks.

Maybe as we get closer to spring....you could write us up some 'how to' threads regarding sodding, planting or projects building out of doors. I know I'll have a few questions for sure as I redo my patio and front yard area.

Duke · 01-17-2006, 07:21 PM

I've been thinking about creating a gardening related website. If I offer to co-run it with you and host it for free, would you be interested?

Of course the only rule I have to enforce is that you need to be present and active at the site at least a few days per week. I've created another website for some friends and that site has since fallen silent and I haven't seen either of them login for months. Since I absorb all costs, maintenance and responsibility, I really need at least a minimum time commitment from the site operator.

If your interested, we can discuss it further.

Ken

TKDLady · 01-18-2006, 01:08 AM

I appreciate the offer and it sounds appealing. I wouldn't have a problem being present and active but I am not much of a gardener. I don't mind talking about what I like and what has and hasn't worked for me but I don't know if I would be qualified to give anyone any advice. I would probably have anyone trying my tips out ready to shoot me within a week!

I guess I would need more details as to what kind of content we are talking about. I can certainly recomend sites I have found useful and books I have read but if anyone got a good look at my yard they would laugh. I try. I really do but my thumb isn't as green as I would like it to be. Also, growing things here in Florida is a challenge unless it is a weed or kudzu.

Duke · 01-18-2006, 01:17 AM

Sorry, I must have misread something somewhere, my bad :? I think it was Merikas thread that confused me a bit.

I wonder if instead of a gardening website, if we should have some kind of a more general "Home and Garden" or "Home Improvement" type of site.

Thoughts?