Ok Ok, you can look at my site...

Ok Ok, you can look at my site...


I have worked on this site....ummmm, like every minute of the last 3 months....

So what do you guys and gals think of my situation?

Tags, links, etc....

http://longislandexchange.com

keywords= long island and long island chat

My partner is from King's Park, so he took over the keyboard when I went to your site. So, you obviously have content for someone familiar with Long Island! ;-)

As I am not that familiar with Long Island (except sitting in Christmas traffic on the LIE) I immediatley went to the bottom of your page to read what your site is all about and wondered why is this info on the bottom of the page, in small text, -it's full of good descritptive information.

If you re-organize your layout and links, you could integrate some of this white space into an informative section near the top. I would squish the Big "Long Island New York" heading using CSS (seems a bit redundant under your logo) and incorporate it as a heading for some of your descriptive text.

-- Your page doesn't have a doctype in the header.
-- I would emphasize some of your descriptive text in the keywords or visa versa.
-- In your title tag, I would have "Long Island Exchange" first and then the descriptive part.
-- I would put all your javascript in an external sheet.
-- I curious, what is the function of the drop down zip codes? I expected it to take me to a section "specific to that area of LI"

well, that's my two bits for what it's worth 8)

cris

Ok to re-iterate what Cris sez.. put the CSS in an external file. Put the js in an external file. Move that content up on the page, and use some <h1> <h2> and <h3> tags that you size in the CSS, so that the site has some content where the spiders can find it... they don't like diving that much...

If you know anything about using CSS for positioning, then use it to put the content higher in the code if you want to leave it down there "below the fold"

Your links are done well... now get incoming links PR4 or higher and have them use a title tag in each link as well, write it for them..

HTH

zen

Thanks a freekin bundle for checkign my site.......I really appreciate the suggestions you guys have made and will be giving it a tun of thought...
In the meantime let me clear up a few questions I have about your suggestions:


What is css and an external file.......
I have seen many sites rank #1 with no doctype whats up with that?
What is an external sheet?
The function of the dropdown zipcodes: When creating the site I realized that MSN gives a tremendouse amount of consideration for text inside the dropdown box..... I added this so I would catch every town as a keyword... works great....

I believe my site is a pr4 or higher....... I have about 8 new pr4 or higher links to my site form Long Island sites....

Cant wait for the update.........

CSS: Cascading Style Sheet. make it external instead of on the page, the robots have to go thru it before they get to content, not good for them, they get tired.

do the same thing for any javascripts, run them externally to the page, and only call them in thru a src.

doctype has more to do with standards and useability. Us designers are a little bit of sticklers for good coding, up to standards. See W3C.org

If all the CSS and javascript is in external files, then the content is higher up on the page, text wise, and then the spiders/robots don't have to work as hard to find it, and digest it.

hth
zen

I didn't even know that could be done (calling the java) I really like the idea of calling java from another source - do you know of a site that does that so I can review the source and site to take a peek?

Ho! I would love to call Java, --I would love to call it a laguage I know ;-)
but here we are speaking of javascript -that's some of the language on your site.

Here, if you go to ferngrove
http://www.ferngrove.com/tmp/ and look at the source code you will see, first that my partner can't spell Sonoma ;-) also the references to the exteranl javascript and CSS:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="includes/js/navmenus.js"></script>

<style type="text/css">
@import "includes/css/sanoma.css";
</style>

if you want to see the style sheet add the address to the url:
http://www.ferngrove.com/tmp/includes/css/sanoma.css

As for css, you have applied some styles to your fonts, a better way of doing it is through CSS, there are a lot of good tutorials out there. It's a very powerful skill.

CSS will allow you to do a lot, we like it because we can make sure our fonts look the same on all browsers and OS's. Our climbing menus on ferngrove will completely fall apart, if the font isn't exactly as we need it to look -so we specify all font sizes in "px"

it's also great to update, if I want all headers to be a diff color, I go in and change the stylesheet, not every friggin page!

There are a lot of good tutorials and books out there, but here's good place to start:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey...de/linking.html

have fun!

Really Awsome Advise SpiralCris !!!!!!

Thanks........... Your the best.......

I am going to look into this....... Sounds like I'll need some time to really dive in...........

Definetly sounds like a great skill........

Java is different from javascript.. just to keep you on the right track... Java is a programming language, and when it is used on the web, it is actually running a little "program" called a class from the server.

Javascript, which is what you are using here for the rollovers etc... is a scripting language, browser based, not server based. If you copy the main part of it into a notepad, save it as something.js, then call it into the page either where it is needed or if it needs to be in the head, there, and then all the lines are gone from your document. Use those tutorials Cris sennt you.

I have one I use on every site, it is the netscape resize hack, and since I design sites using fluid sizes instead of absolute sizes, it is a necessity for me:

I put this in a text fileyes it is DW based code)

function MM_reloadPage(init) { //reloads the window if Nav4 resized
if (init==true) with (navigator) {if ((appName=="Netscape")&&(parseInt(appVersion)==4)) {
document.MM_pgW=innerWidth; document.MM_pgH=innerHeight; onresize=MM_reloadPage; }}
else if (innerWidth!=document.MM_pgW || innerHeight!=document.MM_pgH) location.reload();
}
MM_reloadPage(true);


then I name the file with a .js extension and call it in the head of every page:

<script type="text/javascript" src="whatever.js"></script>

this allows your content to breathe more, and those hungry robots see it better.

hth
zen

I havent had time to dive in yet - but this is definetly something I am going to look into...........Thanks!