The Article Writer

By blogging on a daily basis, I almost feel guilty when I decide to take a break. All my loyal bloggers, with nothing to read, what will become of them?! Seriously, if I was the only blog on the internet, then we’d all be in for some very serious trouble.

Today, I started on a project that I have been putting off for too long; nearly two years to be exact. My in-flight catering site, hosted by the undependable EZBoard community, is in dire need of some special attention. Instead of creating an all new forum, I have decided to fold the messages into my current PHPBB forum. One problem though: EZBoard messages do not convert over to any other format nicely, so I’ll be moving hundreds of threads over by hand. Whew!

No, I won’t be doing this project all at once. Instead, I am dedicating a little bit of time each day for the cutting and pasting of messages. This pace will help me stay focused on other projects and allow me to finish the update by June 1st. When done, the old EZBoard site will be deleted, forever extinguishing my relationship with that archaic board community.

I mentioned last week that I was needing to make a change to my then interim WordPress theme only to switch over to yet another interim theme in the process. The bugginess of a few previous WordPress themes was getting under my skin, so it became imperative that I do something about it or risk losing my sanity.

A month or so ago I downloaded one of Ainsle Johnson’s themes, Chameleon, but I had trouble making the header work. Instead of a color background, all I saw was white. Darn it — one more buggy WP theme — or so I thought.

Turns out that when I ftp’d the files, I did not check to see if all the files were uploaded. This morning I redid that step and everything worked out as planned. The result is now evident to all: witness Chameleon.

I’m keeping this theme in place as it is clean and relatively bug-free. Nothing fancy about it, but it allows me to concentrate on my writing instead of my fretting over a theme that gets under my skin.

Website Grader

I am a fan of various webmaster tools including SEOMoz, Backlink Watch, and DigPageRank just to name a few. These tools have been designed by web geeks for web geeks to help people measure a web site. Recently, I found yet another tool — Website Grader — where webmasters can obtain and salivate over a free report generated for their site. Read on and we’ll take a look at some of the juicy details contained within each report.

Everyone wants to know how their site is measured, right? Absolutely. That’s why the current Google Page Rank update (in progress as we speak), Alexa rank, and Technorati ranking is important to those of us who track this kind of stuff. Sure, search engine result pages (SERPs) are what really counts in my opinion, but if you sell advertising on your site, then some measure of how it that site ranks is critical. Besides, most of us would prefer a site review from a tool instead of a person. A person will tell you that your site stinks while a tool will show you that your site stinks!

The Components of the Tool

As far as Website Grader goes, the report you generate is meant to help you improve your site. Enter in your URL and you’ll get the following information returned to you within one or two minutes:

Google Page Rank — What it is currently.

Web Page Structure — The tool looks at your title tags, META tags, keywords, date URL registered (and date when set to expire), and whether you have a redirect in place or not, for example: thearticlewriter.com to www.thearticlewriter.com.

Header Tags — You are using the various header tags that I am using for this article, aren’t you? Google loves header tags — your grade drops if you don’t use them.

Image Tags — Yes, I am lax in this area. That “alt” description is meant to help the visually impaired. The search engines like “alt” too as it is also a way to slip in a keyword without being spammy.

Google Indexed Pages — For this report the other search engines simply do not matter. Do they matter to you?

Google Crawl Date — Find the date and time of the last Google crawl of your site. If it has been a few days, then you are likely okay. If it has been weeks, uh oh…

Conversion Methods — The tool is looking for two things: an RSS feed and a sign up form. Most of us have the former, but I know most of my sites do not have the latter. Have both tools in place and it could help you turn your traffic into sales.

Inbound Links — How many links from Google, Yahoo, Alexa, and MSN point to your site? I am glad that AlltheWeb and AltaVista weren’t included — let’s get real about what links are important to everyone!

Technorati Ranking — Especially helpful if your site is a blog.

del.icio.us Bookmarks — I need to work on this area!

Alexa Ranking — The lower the number, the better.

Readability Level — Who is your target audience? Elementary school, doctorate or somewhere in between?

Report Link — You can read the report again through the stored link on the site.

Your Overall Grade — Based on number of points per 100 you rank. This figure actually shows up on the top of your report with all of the details following.

Mixed Tidings

I entered four of my URLs and scored 34, 71, 81, and 81 respectively. I was surprised by the lower score for the one site, but I can understand why — it is by far the smallest and most basic site that I run. Still, there is room for improvement across the board so I will take a closer look at my reports to see what I can do to make improvements.

Not Perfect, But Useful

As with any tool, the Website Grader isn’t perfect. What it does do is offer a way for you, the webmaster, to take a look at your site through the grader’s eyes. Kind of like how Mrs. Fishbreath, your 4th grade teacher, gave you a C- for a paper you swore was going to fetch you at least a B+! Unlike Website Grader, too bad Mrs. Fishbreath didn’t give you a second chance.