Welcome to the our new website
This is the new Peter Mac And Associates Website. Why the change? It wasn’t that we were bored with the previous one. It’s just that we found that search engines were reacting less than favourably to much of the HTML tags that were used in it’s production. The site was built using an open source content management system that we had little control over the details of it’s output. So we switched to another CMS that’ smuch more search engine friendly. The details follow…
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the concept of creating a website that can be easily found, read and interpreted by search engines. How this is achieved is a mixture of, on one hand, impirical and well understood knowledge and on the other, an element of guess-work and trying to understand the black-magic of internet search engines.
Our original website was built using a wonderful piece of software called DotNetNuke. This is an open-source content management solution that allow for easy updating of website content, and because most of the guys in Peter Mac’s offices are geeks, at the time it was something new to play with.
One thing to understand before reading on is the fact that a web page is more than the pictures and text you see. Search engines look behind the scenes. To see what a search engine interprets, right-click on this page and select the View Source menu option.
The problem with the output from DotNetNuke is the over reliance on ‘ye-olde worlde’ HTML. This consists of inbuilt styles, fonts, tags and a multitude of other elements that make a webpage look nice, all at the expense of a less than elegant web page. Basically the HTML is clunkier than it needs to be
A big change in web design over the last few years has been the total seperation of format and content using the power of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). What this means is that a website developer creates a display guide that is applied to all the pages on the website. All a content writer has to worry about is content, with absolutely no concern about formatting.
And then there was WordPress…
This site has been built using another piece of open-source software called WordPress. This has been used by bloggers around the world for the last few years and has built such a strong user/support base that it’s hard to ignore. The generated HTML is cross-browser friendly and search engines like it too.
