Uptown Top Ranking

This week was my first time of being absent from college. I do believe that because I only go one day per week I should be able to attend what ever I feel like, however I was full of cold and so were my kids, also I didn’t want to spread my germs around a closed environment. I was a bit fed up missing the user feedback testing as I had my site ready and my form all ready to go.

I do hope my fellow peers can help me out here by downloading my Feedback Form and looking at my website www.dhubert.co.uk and give me the feedback that I missed out on. I have had a few people fill out the form already and even now at this early stage it is interesting to see what a third party will pick up on that I would be otherwise blind to. The website form does not work so please don’t fill it in as I am in the middle of trying to get this to be fully functional.

I am enjoying creating this website as it has a lot of new elements in it that I have been learning in my self study time. The main one being CSS. I can see the very important advantages of using CSS from a ‘cascading’ point of view but would like to learn the advantages of actually ‘creating’ the site using CSS language. There are lots of tips and tricks to remember when designing this way but how is this advantageous over a WYSIWYG way of creating a website? I have read numerous articles both in print and on the net but I still haven’t grasped the idea of using coded language to impress upon a piece of text to be padded by 5 pixels when the Dreamweavers tabular approach does this with a click of a button. I think I need to be sat down in a dark room with a light shining in my face to explain the benefits of when to use CSS and when to use Dreamweaver.

On another subject I have been researching ranking and search engines, Google in particular. Every time I create a new website I get asked the same questions as soon as it is finished.
Why isn’t my website appearing in Google?
Why aren’t I in the top 10 in Google?
When I search for ‘man’, why don’t I appear in Google? I’m a man so I should be there. Etc, etc, etc.

It used to be, a long time ago, that you just had to embed Meta Tags in your HTML pages with a title, description and as many keywords you could think of. Investigating it now it seems that things have changed a little, mainly to do with the vastness of the ever growing internet. You now have to add your website to the Google addurl link, this stops the big submitting programs from submitting irrelevant material in bulk. Even then you are not guaranteed to appear. You then have to verify that you own the website by inserting a page that Google will tell you what to name, upload it to the server, then get it verified. You then have to go one step further after all this by creating an XML sitemap and attaching it to your domain. Which is what I am looking into at the moment.

I am all googled out now but as a thank you for filling out my feedback form and sending it back to me I will leave you with this useless but fun link I came across while researching search engine ranking. Just type in a name and it creates a Google style logo for you. Here’s one I made earlier.