El Greko's Website MKII up and running

Subject: El Greko's Website MKII up and running
From: George Papavgeris
Date: 25 Oct 03 - 02:30 PM

After your helpful comments of MKI, and with all content now in place (including photo galleries, lyrics and soundbites), my website now awaits your visit and pleasure. It is here.
Grateful for comments on performance and additional content you'd like to see.
I would also appreciate some advice on what meta tags to add, so that it will show up on search engines.

Subject: RE: El Greko's Website MKII up and running
From: Leadfingers
Date: 25 Oct 03 - 02:46 PM

Thats an improvement on Number one George.Definately points for effort

Subject: RE: El Greko's Website MKII up and running
From: treewind
Date: 26 Oct 03 - 10:18 AM

Stunning!

Two niggles:

• I can't play the WMA files of the music. It is a proprietary format only available to Windows users. I dout if Mac users can hear them, and I certainly can't play them on my Linux system. MP3 would be OK, Ogg Vorbis would be truly enlightened


• You need to get into an image editing program and reduce the size of the album images to the size they actually display as they are uncessarily big.
  

Then it'll be perfect!
(I love the pictures!)
Anahata

Subject: RE: El Greko's Website MKII up and running
From: Hamish
Date: 27 Oct 03 - 03:14 AM

Meta tags? Try description and keywords. Although the search engines have different algorithms for prioritising hits. Google, for instance, uses the number of other sites which link to it. And has a clever way of knowing which of those sites are (more) worth taking notice of. It's important to have a good relevant title (which you do) cos that's what's shown in the search hit list. And it can help some searches to use

tags with the important words to (which you don't) - but not for Google (I think).

Nice looking site, tho'.

Subject: RE: El Greko's Website MKII up and running
From: George Papavgeris
Date: 27 Oct 03 - 09:22 AM

OK, the soundfiles are MP3s now, and the album images resized. I am starting to also resize some of the pics in the Photos section.

I also added some more info on the Contents page. And I have had lots of wonderful advice on meta tags, which I will implement in the next day or so.

Subject: RE: El Greko's Website MKII up and running
From: treewind
Date: 27 Oct 03 - 12:56 PM

Can't see the album pictures at all now!
Are you sure you've got the files uploaded, in the right directory, capitalization right? CLTCoversmall.JPG for instantace... Definitely says not found.

(Note: different capitalizatoon from the actual file name will work locally on Windows, but it won't work on the web which is case sensitive, or at least most web servers are)

Anahata

Subject: RE: El Greko's Website MKII up and running
From: George Papavgeris
Date: 27 Oct 03 - 01:58 PM

They're definitely there, Anahata. I was tidying up (renaming files to get rid of spaces) and re-uploaded the whole site. It took abt 30 mins, and you must have hit on it half way. Check now.

Subject: RE: El Greko's Website MKII up and running
From: C-flat
Date: 27 Oct 03 - 02:04 PM

The site looks great. I really enjoyed listening to the sound files and browsing the lyrics. Some terrific songs there.
C-flat(your most recent fan)

Subject: RE: El Greko's Website MKII up and running
From: Hamish
Date: 28 Oct 03 - 05:14 AM

yep - that capitalisation thing's a b****r. I didn't know about it when I set up "Tudor.htm" (sic. and I am. Sick, that is.) And now I'm stuck with it. Best to keep to all lower case and no embedded spaces (but you know that now). Best to avoid special characters, too. 0-9, a-z are all safe, and some others, too. But definitley not ampersand, colon, fullstop and quite a few others.

Subject: RE: El Greko's Website MKII up and running
From: George Papavgeris
Date: 28 Oct 03 - 05:21 AM

Surely, capitalisation shouldn't be a problem if you take the filenames on from "browse". Only if you type them in manually can mistakes occur.

Subject: RE: El Greko's Website MKII up and running
From: treewind
Date: 28 Oct 03 - 05:55 AM

Spot on about filenames from browse. If your software enables you to do it that way, it's a lot safer. My method tends to involve more typing, and I'm used to an environment where names tend to be lower case and spaces are a pain, so I follow Hamish's guidelines.

You seem to be right about being in the middle of an update when I looked. It all looks great now. The album cover images are about 10k which is a good size.

Anahat

Subject: RE: El Greko's Website MKII up and running
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 28 Oct 03 - 06:29 AM

As for lower case fimenames and spaces, special characters...

I started back in 1996 with DOS format filenames after some hassles with various older systems (non-windows) on the net having hassles with my clever windows style filenames - I then tried to only use UPPERCASE 8.3 (DOS format) file names i.e. FOOLESHM.HTM for that reason. Windows carefully translates filenames like these into its own fooleshm.htm or Fooleshm.htm anyway...

Things may have improved nowadays with fewer people with older incompatible systems...

Metatags -- ahhh, that's a nest of worms - first consider why do you want to have the code generator name and all that sort of stuff taking up page real estate - it slows down the loading, and who is going to search for your page by all that anyway?

You might want your name... maybe date of last edit - but why not put that in the visible text content at the bottom of the page...

Two useful ones...

I had to substitute the square for the broken brackets to get this message past Cerebus... :- )

[meta name="description" http-equiv="description" Content="...."]

is useful for most search engines

and

[meta name="classification" http-equiv="classification" content="...."]

is worth consideration.

The content... well... pick words that will help people locate you - you also should consider some common misspellings for certain words too - although judging by some of the misspellings I have seen on the Mudcat - trying too hard that way lies madness... :-)

If you become known for something unique - use that word too - some search engines ignore things if you have too many words, or try to be clever and repeat words.

If you want to play the rankings game - ah, that's another matter... :-)

Robin