Friday 13 June 2008

Big bother

We've had no repeat of last week's change page errors today, but I'm in a tremendously bad mood anyway and moaning at people left, right and centre.

It's not a very productive way to go about things - particularly when the main cause of my angst is a broken-down boiler at home which has left me without any hot water for two days - so I will try to snap out of it.

A mixed response to the decision to put Alexandra from Big Brother on the front page - one poster said Advertiser founder Jesse Ward would be spinning in his grave, which is probably a bit of an over-reaction. My hunch is it will probably sell pretty well.

That said, it's quite unusual for a local paper to campaign for one of their own to LOSE a TV show, but that's more down to her than us.

Back to the web, and it's been a source of constant frustration that this site scores so poorly when you look for Croydon news in Google or other search engines.

We'll be unveiling a new design fairly soon that will address that issue, and will also include quite a few other changes. Watch this space.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is not a matter of site content, but ensuring that your stories are properly coded for search engine optimisation... You should also try to use Google ads on your site, too. For some bizarre reason, Google tends to direct readers towards those websites which carry its own ads

Anonymous said...

All true, but the template was specifically designed to stop Google's spiders crawling the site, so we've been fighting a losing battle. It seems a very strange thing to have done looking at it five years on, admittedly.

Anonymous said...

>>>
the template was specifically designed to stop Google's spiders crawling the site
<<<

Now we know you never take responsibility for the cock-ups on the paper, Ian, but who was responsible for this wonderful piece of design idiocy?

Ian said...

No idea, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time...it's an old template, which is why we're changing it.

Ian said...

Yep - but you might as well get all your dud predictions out of the way in one week.