Handyman Site ready

[Chris Bacon]

It should actually be "Window Sills" - where the "cill" variant came from, I don't know. Some English usage newsgroup may be able to help....

[Grunff]

This is really not true. It is true to a small extent in areas where there is much competition (like selling mortgages or sexy underwear online), but not the case for low competition areas.

I could site many examples of this, but I'll stick to just one - the FAQ. That gets large amounts of search engine traffic, and doesn't use any form of pay per click.

There were approximately 1200 UK searches for "handyman" in December on Google. That's a good amount of traffic, with not an enormous amount of competition.

This is of course perfectly good use, I just think it's a shame to ignore the potential search engine traffic.

[The3rd Earl Of Derby]

Could you get rid of this, sounds to me like a forgetful person. ;-)

" If we forget to bring something we need to do a job, the time spent getting it isn't charged for!"

-- Sir Benjamin Middlethwaite

[Rumble]

No it's to do with the fact you are viewing the website in Internet Explorer and John's (probably) viewing in Firefox. You should consider installing Firefox on your machine and then amending your code to make sure that your pages work the same in both browsers.

You can download Firefox free from

HTH

[The3rd Earl Of Derby]

you'rs The Medway Handyman has over 30 years experience of all sorts of building maintenance & repair.

Revamp The Medway Handyman has over 30 years experience of all manner of building maintenance & repair.

-- Sir Benjamin Middlethwaite

[sPoNiX]

The key to getting a good Google ranking is to get backlinks to your site. The more backlinks the higher the ranking.

sponix

[John Cartmell]

"Should we ever forget to bring something we need to do a job, you won't be charged for the additional time taken."

might be more positive.

[david lang]

Good point m'lud & thanks John for the re write.

Dave

[david lang]

I'm only judgeing it by my other web site

but I suppose you are right, there are quite a lot of magicians advertizing and a lot of entertainment agencies.

How do you find out about stuff like that? Can you search search engines?

I'll get me metatags sorted!

Dave

[Grunff]

It's my job :-)

There's no short answer, there are a whole bunch of tools which we use to get this type of data. One tool which is available to everyone for free is Google adwords accounts - you can create an account (without necessarily spending any money), and do some research on various search terms. On its own this isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than nothing.

Actually, meta tags are largely ignored now (far too easy to abuse). Page titles, link text, headings/sub-headings, text formatting, keyword density all take precedence.

I'm not suggesting spending large amounts of time/money optimising your site - but an evening or two spent reading about basic search engine optimisation and making some simple changes could make a big difference to your traffic.

[John]

Where abouts 'up north'?

John

[nrh]

In news:43d76665$1 [e-mail], Chris Bacon scribed:

What is this 'AOL', please?

Nigel

[The3rd Earl Of Derby]

Eh! AmericaOnLine

-- Sir Benjamin Middlethwaite

[Adrian C]

Fine, but some miscellaneous trimmings to be sprinked? Like...

Copyright notice, privacy policy, accessibility statement, E&OE statement, browser and javascript compatibility statement, watermarked images?

[Douglas de Lacey]

All good wishes to your venture: please take all these comments as positive and helpful criticism!

1. Your pages don't validate. Check them all at . You'll find that this will also solve some of the layout issues other people have mentioned. If you write valid html, you can be pretty sure it will render properly on everyone's software.
2. There is a loooooong-standing convention that blue text = link. You mess with this at your peril.
3. A corollary to the above: you could do worse than browse Jakob Nielsen's stuff at and subscribe to his mailing list. He discusses what works and what doesn't on commercial websites.
4. As a commercial enterprise I *think* you are subject to Disability Discrimination legislation. Go to and check your pages there. You certainly break one of the rules by not having an alt text in your images.
5. You generally use semicolons (eg your phone no) where I'd use colons.
6. Home Page. "all kinds" of tools? Literally? "we even tidy up properly" sounds a bit snide. "always tidy up" perhaps? "Not only are we ... " the use of two dashes is confusing. In the next para the repeated "to find out" is harsh. Change the second to "see"?
7. Carpentry "inside & out" of what? "indoors and out" better I think. "Fixing Mirrors" -- what, if they're broke?:-)
8. Plumbing The list doesn't re-size properly to a smaller window. (in fact this is true of all your pages) The repeated use of "fixing" makes "leaking" (taps) look distinctly odd!

9 Electrics "Part 'P'": make this a link to Part P itself or a description of how it affects you. Your image is not immediately recongisable as a (UK) plug. "Fit outside lights (providing the cable terminates in a 13amp plug).": "provided that" would be better: you aren't doing the providing. 10 Seen Something? "We can fix anything to anything" is a bold boast! Beware the Trades Descriptions Act:-)

1. Charges When does your estimate change into a firm quotation? "more than one days work" apostrophe in "day's"

12 I agree with most of the comments made by others and haven't repeated them here.

Bon chance!

Douglas de Lacey.

[Grunff]

What crap!

[meow2222]

Good to see a site thats simple, clear as daylight, and to the point.

NT

[Douglas de Lacey]

Not the most helpful comment! It stems from the days when most AOL users were thought to be clueless, and would post zillions of response which said nothing but "me too" or "I agree".

Douglas de Lacey.

[The3rd Earl Of Derby]

Google is his friend.

-- Sir Benjamin Middlethwaite

[nrh]

In news:dr8bcd$2sl$ [e-mail], Douglas de Lacey scribed:

Douglas, thanks! I did Google and Wikipedia it and even though all I got was America On Line, I still didn't make that connection. ;-) heh heh.

N.