Indiana Jones 5: The Quest for Lost Website Facts

There are some popular myths out there about Holy Grails and Lost Arks and the Indiana Jones movies have done a great job of telling us stories around these.


The latest myth is that both Harrison Ford and Shia LaBoeuf both signed 3 movie deals for the return to the big screen

Is it a myth? Personally I'd love it to be true. Indy and Mutt made a good team in the Crystal Skull and I'd like to see them return.

I'm not sure I'm ready for Indy to pass the hat over yet though - Harrison's doing pretty well for a 65-year-old. I enjoyed the hat joke at the end of the movie.

You know, there are plenty of myths out there about web design too. If you own a website or have spent much time online you will probably have encountered a few.

There are keyword myths, META myths, PageRank myths and liquid layout myths.

How do you separate the myths from the facts? You need to do this otherwise you may waste a lot of time and effort.

So read on...

Dr. Henry Jones Sr spent many years researching the myth of the Holy Grail and wrote all his facts in his Grail Diary. It's all documented in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

I think this is what you need here for your web design. So where do you find one?

There are a lot of books and websites out there that can help you along the right path. An awful lot. You need a book just to tell you which ones you should read first!

And there's the problem. I've never seen a single book or a single website that tells you everything you need to know.

Sure, there are a few guiding symbols out there. There are even a few pentacles hidden on this page (feel free to click on number 5 if you liked this lens).

As you read on you'll find a few of my favorite web design myths and some facts to help you along. You can use these and vote for your favorites at the bottom of the page. You can even add your own favorites and see what other people think of them!

Social networking sites such as digg.com and del.icio.us are popular places for sharing and recommending other websites, but they are surrounded by some serious mythology.

I can digg my own stuff? Great - I can add my own links and win lots of traffic!

It's partly true, but this is also a bit of a myth.

Social networking is about working with other people, checking other websites and then recommending and voting for your favorites.

It's not about voting for your own stuff. So if you're on digg then you need to get a few friends to help you out. Remember, even Indiana always has a companion.

You can share your favorites with them. They can do the same. Hopefully they will digg your work too. If you only ever submit your own stuff then digg probably won't penalize you but you'll probably never be very successful.

You need to get going on submitting other content. Find good stuff that's interesting to others and eventually you'll get known for recommending quality sites.

That's when people will notice you and will start to look for you on these sites. This will lead to more diggs, more exposure and more traffic coming in your direction. And that's good.

This is not entirely true but they are less important than they used to be.

These days Google places more emphasis on keywords used properly within the content of the page.

How do you use keywords properly? Use them when you write your pages! Don't overdo it. If it sounds spammy when you read it to yourself, start using the delete key.

Some of the other search engines still use the META tags (wait, you mean it's not just Google?) so don't ditch them just yet.

The DESCRIPTION tag can be useful. This is sometimes picked up and listed in search results, so you need to make this is relevant to your page content. How do you do this? Just make it a decent description of the page!

Above all, don't spend weeks optimizing your meta tags. Don't waste time on forums arguing about density and ordering and white hat techniques. Write your page, give the tags your best shot, then move on and write another page.

If your PageRank would just go up then you'd get to the top on Google. The search traffic would then start rolling in.

Wise adventurers know that it takes more than just a good Page Rank to score top on Google.

Be careful too: the search for PageRank can become an obsession (ask Junior about this one). Don't keep checking your PageRank - it's a great waste of time that you should be using on more productive stuff anyway.

If you want some suggestions for more productive things to do then check out my 7 Google Alternatives lens.

So how do you get yourself higher up on Google? It's a combination of visitors, how often you update your site, keyword relevance, good content and so on (oh, and PageRank is included too...)

Yes, they are clever (if you can make them look OK). I'm not sure about the extra visitors though.

If you are wondering what a liquid layout is, try expanding a typical Amazon.com product page and see what happens. If the boxes stretch and the text flows differently, its a liquid layout.

Liquid layouts can be difficult if you have a lot of fixed rectangles in your pages (these are sometimes known as pictures). Fixed rectangles don't squash very easily.

They can fall over a bit if you have a very narrow screen or a very wide screen (such as rich people with wide screen Macs). The long lines of text can stretch across the screen and look rough.

Why not stick to a fixed size? It works OK for movies (you don't see too many stretch movie theater screens)

Ah, I hear you say, what about people with different screen sizes? What about making important stuff appear above the fold?

Well, for the first point, check your website traffic. Most people these days use around 1024 or slightly more. Easy.

On the second point, yes, liquid layouts help to put more stuff above the fold. But if your site isn't interesting enough for visitors to hit the down key then you might need a rethink about your content.

To summarize, ask yourself if a liquid layout is really important or just something to show you are clever (by the way it's OK to do this if you are selling your web design skills)

You need to submit your site to the search engines to get it spidered

(Which means indexed, or found, so it appears somewhere on the search results).

There's always a bunch of creepy crawlies in the Indiana Jones movies. To be honest snakes are usually more of a problem for Indy. I don't worry about spiders anymore.

There's no need these days to submit your site to Google. It may be true for some of the smaller search engines.

Provided you have links to your pages from other sites (blogs, Squidoo, etc) Google will find them. You do have these don't you?

Actually it can be quite scary how quickly the spiders find you, but I don't want to alarm anyone with a phobia

Indy is persistent and doesn't give up.

I'm not suggesting you use your whip to climb back on to a speeding truck after you've been thrown off.

But you do need to keep trying ideas until you find ones that work. Set your goal and don't give up until you're reached it - just like Indy chasing the Ark of the Covenant.

Remember there are a lot of ideas out there to help you "fix" your website and a lot of these ideas are myths. You need to be skeptical about any suggestions unless you find proof that they work. This is just like Indy too. He doesn't really believe the legend of the Crystal Skulls until he discovers the remains of the Spanish Conquistador Francisco de Orellana

Maybe the ideas in this lens will help you to make some choices. If you want some more, then head on over to my blog at infinite42.com.

If you like my blog and are looking for further Illumination you can sign up for my Better Website guide. It's free, and an Archeologist's dream