Keeping this website going is a lot like housekeeping: there is always something else that needs to be cleaned up.
About a week ago, I decided the way the contributions page (formerly Ways to Help) was set up was not making life easy enough for either those who wanted to become involved or those who just wanted to make a donation. It was too many words to get to something that needed to be simple.
So last night, I sat down and redesigned that piece of the experience. You can check out the results if you want. I won’t go anywhere while you do.
And while I was under the hood anyway, I decided it was time I figured out how Search Engine Optimization worked. So I wrestled with what the books say to do, then wrestled with the various parameters on the site–discovering in the process that the way I write headlines–while fine for the viewing public–is not so hot for search engines trying to determine whether people will want your site on the first page or not. I also discovered that while everyone keeps telling me to keep these posts relatively short–400-500 words–anything under 300 is too short as far as Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Bing are concerned. Everything on the site now registers as at least okay where SEO is concerned.
I’d gotten tired of feeling I was writing in a vacuum, so I asked our designer to set up a way for people to comment easily on these posts. We debated not screening them before they were posted, but finally settled on moderating them so no spam would slip through. So far, we have had 25 comments made, none of them really germane to what we are doing here, and more than half of them spam. Instead of getting useful feedback, I get ads from people offering everything from fast ways to build hits to sexual enhancements, most appearing to have been written by people whose familiarity with English is fleeting at best. I swear some of it has to be computer-generated gibberish.
But those posts have to be cleared out every day, both here and on our Gmail account, or they will become a real chore to keep up with. This is our second attempt to make this more interactive. Our forum very quickly became so inundated with junk, we took it off-line and eventually shot it. But I really do want to hear what people have to say, so we will keep trying to come up with a way for that to happen.
I’ve also been rethinking how to use our Facebook page. It got shifted to the back burner last fall when we started developing this site. But as this matures into something that is more maintenance and less major lifting, we have to get back to developing our social media side. That means not only revisiting what we are doing on Facebook, but also biting the bullet on Twitter. At least Tumblr seems not to have really taken off.
What do you see as our next online priority?
