bikes and things

After Emma forwarded me a link to some free WordPress themes I’ve decided to give this place a bit of a facelift for 2012. I’ve had this domain since 2004 and I started out with a PHPwebsite install which was fairly basic, I then moved to WordPress in 2007 with the blue looking theme which was here until a few days ago. I can’t for the life of me find a screenshot to illustrate what the old one looked like which is annoying. For now I’m settling with this new theme which also supports a number of the new functions that WordPress have developed since 2007. A few bit were wonky earlier with the layout but fortunately I was able to call on some help at lunch today.

Recently I had noticed that this website no longer appeared on Google searches. If you searched for Andy Matthews on google.com or .co.uk this would appear as the third or fourth result. Searching for the same term no longer show this in the listings.

When I switched to a WordPress blog I simply kept the old site in place and redirected to this one. A few weeks ago I began deleting the remenants of this old site and I have a feeling this has something to do with it. It looks like Google was crawling the old site whilst not indexing the new.

I spent quite a bit of time working out how to sort this out and submitted the site to Google again and went through their webmaster tools. I also added a new robots.txt file and added more keywords to the header template. I’ve also changed the structure of the permenant links to each blog post. This now has a date and text description of the post which should help.

Just waiting for Google to crawl the site again and will see what happens after that. Fingers crossed.

All ok, instructions looked a bit intimidating but seemed to go ok…

I’ve decided that it’s time for a bit of a change on andy-matthews.co.uk. It ended up being a blogging page with pictures in the end and I can’t really see the point in having the rest there. I’ve kept the old site and you can probably still get to it via google but this is the new one which I’m going to use for posting pictures and the odd rambling. Hopefully this new version is clearer and easier to read. The old site was starting to look very cluttered and I never had time to update it.

I’ve installed wordpress on the webserver and I’m trying out a new blogging tool called
Marsedit.

The great thing about Marsedit is that you can work offline and post when you come online again. It also connects with flickr making posting images a whole lot easier. I’d imagine it’ll make things much easier and I’ll probably be more inclined to update the site.

Anyway, lots more pictures to be posted soon.