Dayspring Community Church

I took over this site in 2005 and maintained the site through 2011 to improve the timeliness of the content. I added several features to make the administration easier, and capable of editing by the church staff. These included: Adding an online gallery. Converting the layout to CSS to reduce download time, improve search engine ranking, and improve readability for those with visual impairments. Developing dynamic pages for each of the ministries so that church staff can make … [Read more...]

Google Using Page Speed as a Ranking Factor in Search Results

Google announced this week that the speed of a page is now being considered as part of how they rank pages on a web site.  This has some people happy, others scrambling. There are a couple of things which need to be considered with this news. Google uses over 200 factors to "grade" a site, determining where it should be placed in the search engine rankings. Adding 1 additional factor, unless it is a large factor should have little effect on the search results. "All things being equal I … [Read more...]

Does clean HTML lead to better Search Engine Rankings?

I've seen numerous posts where people have claimed that good clean HTML leads to better SEO rankings. I've even talked about the lie that of the link between SEO and valid HTML. I've yet to see any studies done which verify this claim and in fact I've even seen evidence to the opposite effect being true. I pointed out how in some competitive markets, the higher the ranking for the site the worse the validation recently in another post. This does not mean that poor code relates to higher … [Read more...]

Optimize Your Site For More Sales

Previously, I've talked about optimizing your website to improve how fast it loads.  This not only improves the perception of your site, but also how likely it is for people to stay and make a purchase, or request more information. Optimizing your site for sales isn't as easy as optimizing your site for speed. When we want to increase speed we know many ways to improve the performance.  We can modify files to be smaller, have files load in a different order, move the server to a faster … [Read more...]