CSS and Browser "Differences"

"Differences" is a polite way of saying that the various browsers do not display a given web page consistently. Sometime a single browser will display a web page in a couple of different ways, neither necessarily correct. This made learning and implementing CSS for LucienneDiver.com challenging. It was hard to view this as an opportunity to excel rather than a real annoyance.
Off to pursue additional opportunities to excel with CSS. Scott

Website Explosion

Well, going from 1 site started in November 2007 to 3 might not be an explosion to you, but it seems that way to me. First the Wildness Wildcats at Wilderness Lake Preserve needed some web pages. Since my wife and I are both Wilderness Wildcat Relay for Life team members I volunteered to add some pages to the Diversions Jewelry site. The number of Wildcats pages really grew when online buying of raffle tickets was added. Google wilderness wildcats quilt or go to Diversions Jewelry.

Then my daughter, who had parked Lucienne Diver's Website
at GoDaddy, sold her second book under her own name, needed help getting her site started.

Then I decided that I also need a personal website my website since I was considering going into the Internet "consulting" arena. Since I am still learning a lot every day, "consultant" is a real stretch. Wrestling with GoDaddy eccentricities and relearning how hard getting a simple icon developed and displayed by the browsers reminded me why "consultants" are in demand.

SEO and JavaScript

Not saying I am new to JavaScript, but I just finished checking to see if it was one word. It turns out that cleverly putting the "enlarge" link next to the thumbnail of the merchandise may prevent search engine spiders from getting a clear look at the description. Of course that location was the most logical for persons viewing the page. But if the search engines don't let people find my site, actual persons won't be looking at the pages anyway. It became pretty clear that manually copy and updating pages with several items of information in several places was turning into an error prone nightmare. JavaScript makes the problem more manageable, as the five basic pieces of information for each necklace set need to be entered only once per set. The script handles places the bits of information in various combinations in multiple locations. There is no flagging of errors, so a missing bit of punctuation just causes things not to work without providing much in the way of hints. This is becoming less of a problem as I grow more familiar with the language. If you do not have a strong software background, expect a lot of frustration unless you take some classes.

Controlling Info Shown When Pages Are Indexed

L3860 Snowflake Obsidian .. and silver plate. About 17 1/2 inches ...

Submit for testing

",'white','siteadvisor:','L3860 Snowflake Obsidian .. and silver plate. About 17 1/2 inches ...',1.0)" style="z-index: 999; position: absolute;" onmouseout="shut(event)" src="siteadvisor:untested.gif" border="0" height="16" width="16">

L3860. Snowflake Obsidian .. and silver plate. About 17 1/2 inches. $35. This invoice has already been paid or similar message from PayPal will appear if ...

sneaked into the results shown by Google in response to "site:diversionjewelry.com". It was a surprise to me, but wouldn't have been to someone with a little more experience. Of course, someone actually looking at the picture on the web page would have known they were looking at a necklace and earring set, but Google's web crawler bot was only using the text to create the entry shown in the search results. Someone looking for necklaces probably would never have seen the search result at all. Obviously, right. Not exactly rocket science. Now the words "necklace and earrings" appears in the page title, content meta, alt data for the images and visible text. Added text should also prevent the message from PayPal text from appearing in the search results. This was a lot of work to accomplish, but hopefully will be worth the effort.

Looking At Search Results

It was easy to get wrapped up in the detail of designing the website and trying to take all of the advice available on the web. After submitting site maps and other information to search engines so that they can index the new site, you need to wait long enough for the results of this effort to show up in response to searches. It is pretty daunting to see that "bead jewelry" produces over a million Google hits. "bead necklace" produced closer to 2 million hits. When you consider that the first two pages of hits (say a total of 20) are all that are likely to get looked at, you wonder whether anyone is actually going to know your site is out there. If they don't, http://DiversionsJewelry.com isn't going to sell many necklaces and earrings even if the site looks great, the merchandise is attractive and reasonably priced.

One thing that became glaringly obvious was that treating the "description" meta the same a the "keyword" meta was a bad mistake. Not putting the information I wanted to see in search results at the beginning of the page was another error. I also noticed that it was very important to associate complete (standalone) information with each item for sale and their pictures. This allows the images to be indexed by the search engines, providing another way for customers to find the site.

Initial Useful Links Page

For someone thinking of starting their own website, the upper links on http://diversionsjewelry.com/mylinks.html are a good place to start. This page will be updated with additional links as time allows and new usefull pages are discovered.

Google Actually Finds Recent Pages

Since I started working on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for my site it has become extraordinarily clear that Google not only provides real help to webmasters via Google webmaster tools, but actually shows my web pages and other site information when I search for
"diversions jewelry". In spite of my having submitted information to Yahoo, Yahoo can only find a mention in something from the middle of this year. I you want recent, current information I strongly suggest searching with Google.