Tweaking is usually a part I often do for some given reason.
Currently I am focussing on the end of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
As I have been looking around, I have noticed a couple of things that
really don't add up much. This is in comparison with the original
concept of thesoundofreason.net or evanderheide.demon.nl if you will. As
I have noticed is that the original 2 domains had a pagerank of 3.
While currently the pagerank of reasonexperts is set to 1.
At
some point it makes sense that it has a very low pagerank at this point.
evanderheide.demon.nl had a lifetime of 11 years, while
thesoundofreason.net was alive for 2 years straight. So having a domain
running for 1 year, and having a pagerank of 1 makes sense. However, it
could be improved here at some point. And using a proper SEO strategy
makes sense to cover the basis of a good pagerank.
First of all I
have a set of keywords I will be most likely focus on. These keywords
range from reason to tutorials to some effects in the general sense. At
some point there are some keywords where the site reasonexperts.com is
ranking pretty well. Even while they are not the primary keywords people
would search for, but at least there is some form of search volume
around those areas.
This is one of the main reasons why I had to
change the concept of the original 'windows 8 lookalike' page to
something more static. As it is right now. As in look and feel it will
be less attractive, however... eventually I can start working on those
as soon as the keywords have installed proper on the google index.
As
the keywords are mostly there, and there is still some parts which
could be added later on, another side aspect is page load times. And
personally there is a lot that could be improved over time with this
one.
Facebook is a killer loader regarding to load times
First
I am getting rid of the facebook like buttons. It just fucking baffles
me that an average like button takes more then a second to load up... If
people would like the page, they would probably share it themselves on
facebook. Simply said... I will replace these facebook stuff with custom
buttons in stead since it does not make sense.
Soundcloud load times
Soundcloud
is starting to become a big mess at this point. One thing I personally
don't get is why there are 3 different methods to embed a soundcloud
post with. Second, I don't get it why there are crossdomain scripting
errors when ever the newly formed HTML 5 plugin loads up. And last, I
don't get it why this thing 'freezes' up the page from rendering from
time to time. Maybe the last bit is a firefox issue... But at least I am
experiencing troubles with it.
So... bottom line with soundcloud
on the frontpage... it may be removed as well (since I barely get any
plays on those things anyways).
It might be that I am going to
replace the soundcloud play feature with a custom made feature on the
frontpage eventually. At least it would make the load times much better
this way.
MySQL Query Hell
With
the initial kernel setup, I thought it would be nice to throw all sorts
of MySQL queries towards the database server to get all sorts of
information to present them. Eventually most of this was done on a
custom box (so I could do whatever the fuck I wanted to do with it).
Since Reasonexperts is moved towards a hosting company, there is an
additional problem next to having limited diskspace: it isn't a
dedicated box...
To improve the load times, I am currently
trying to analyze what type of MySQL queries are running from the
webserver. Most of them are pretty darn fast. However limiting them with
lesser queries means that the render times will be reduced. There is a
lot of overhead being generated by "counting" items. Even while these
items are usually fixed (for instance on category levels). Therefor I
have been replacing one part of code with a new piece of code that would
only count these items once... and each time the Content Management
System makes changes to the pages, the counter will auto reset itself
and start the whole counting process over again,
This reduces the amount of queries with 34 queries in one go... There, that is effective ;)
Speeding
things up makes the user visit faster, thus people might like it more
this way... thus it makes sense to put some focus on this issue as well
(even while it is just milliseconds work, that doesn't matter, every
millisecond counts in my world).
Tweaking the Template
I
was personally never aware that IE9 started to mess things up bigtime
with the current template. There was one main issue that basically
screwed things up big time. An A HREF (HTML method for putting links
around an image, text or whatever) made the images turn into images with
borders. I am aware of this issue, since IE is an incompliant mess
too... Therefor I added a simple piece to the CSS file to get rid of it
all:
* {border:0px}
And done...
Next to
this minor flaw, I have been setting up a wider template style. Some of
the older images I used on TSOR (thesoundofreason.net if you will) were
made on a resolution of 640px something.. The currently template only
holds images of 600px wide (thanx to some paddings). Because this made
some articles unreadable I had to do something about this. I could
resize all the images etc. However, I was already having in mind (read
the december update on Reasonexperts.com) to change the template with a wider size.
Anyways, enough talk for now... Happy easter! Ow wait.. its december... ah fuck it...
