Well, not really. There’s been a bunch of stuff lying around on this topic for years. In fact, I started this operation at least three years ago and it fizzled out. Its a good job it did because there’s been a bunch of stuff that’s new I can apply. One thing is the use of CSS layout.
I used it on the warthog.co.za website design six years ago with some success. The entire website is full of divs and in fact, there’s only one table in the entire website.
The new website relates the story of the Voortrekkers - a real adventure. I used the domain voortrekker-history.co.za as it contains a couple of good keywords.
I see that voortrekkers.com is starting up but I wonder how well it will do with a .com? I find that local sites with .com TLDs sometimes never feature in the Google.co.za index.
The website is all complete, at least for the next few months. The only thing I need to do is to add some adsense ads to get the site to pay for itself.
I’m very happy with voortrekker-history.co.za because it’s getting simpler to put this type of website together. The basic framework is a dynamicdrive CSS template, a cssplay.co.uk flyout menu and a CSS radiussed box.
These three elements can be mixed together and customized in a variety of formats to produce a wide range of websites. The sites also have a bit more functionality which is easy to include. Text size adjustment, email to friend, no right click and a print stylesheet that kills all the divs except the content div. The menu is a PHP include for easy admin. Because the content of the website is a narrative, there are links to the next page at the foot of each page. I have also tried to include as much graphic material as possible to make the pages interesting. Each page has a Google API search box.
Part of the rationale for the site was to see how easy it would be to put 65 pages together in a fully functional package. Most of the time was, incidentally spent on tidying up code and loose content.
I’ve been very slow to move from tables because of all the workarounds and multiple stylesheets that needed to be used to cover all the browser possibilities. This arrangement works well in Chrome, FF and IE without major CSS changes to the stylesheets. I use a ’strict’ DTD so that I try at least to keep to the straight and narrow and again, the CSS workarounds are less. The site also uses for the first time, a Chrome browser sniffer for the small differences.
The advantage of using CSS over tables is that search engines come across the content before the menu column. The site employs all the standard search cues - plain text (not graphic text) in the header, the lower text changed for every page with relevant words that are found in the content below; the footer parenthasizing the text at the top of the page; the filenames not ‘about.php’ but ‘about_the_great_trek.php’; all images having search friendly ‘alt’ tags; the divs given keyword ‘titles’. Its ready to rock ‘n roll for Google. Let’s see where it is in six months.
The website is not yet in the Google index but I will be interested to see where it ends up after Christmas. I have only linked to it from the Warthog website so far but when I’m taking a swing around my other local sites, I’ll add a link. Warthog has all the basic content for this site hidden in the tourism section and ranks for ‘vootrekker history’ at #1 in Google for voortrekker history.
