NACHI.TV - Web Topics for Home Inspectors

[Chris Morrell, CTO]

Sometime over the next couple of months we're going to be putting together a Web design NACHI.TV show. I'll be using some material from a course I taught last year, but would like to cater as much as possible to specific topics most interesting to home inspectors.

So in preparation for the show, I'd love to define some of the topics you folks want me to cover, and (even better), line up some specific questions that I can answer.

I know that search engine optimization is high up there in the list of topics. What else? Also, what are specific questions you'd like answered?

Cheers,

[Michael R. Boyett]

When we went to the new message board this year I found some of your explanations regarding columns, column widths, colors, etc interesting. I see some HI websites that require excessive scrolling, they overlap off the right side, etc. So, a specific question might be "How does one effectively design a web page for easy viewing? Also, how about "How do 'frames' affect a website?"

[Chris Morrell, CTO]

Originally Posted by mboyett

"How does one effectively design a web page for easy viewing?"

"How do 'frames' affect a website?"

Great questions! I'll be sure to address 'em. Anyone else?

[Nick Gromicko]

Is it true that seach engines don't give a hoot about metatags?

[John McKenna]

Most inspectors would like to know...

How to make the phone ring?
How to answer the phone?

Perhaps Nick could make an "Inspectors only section"
and make a demo video of how to close a sale on the
phone.

Have another person act like the customer and let
Nick demonstrate how to sell ice cubes, over the phone,
to an Eskimo... so to speak... smile.

[Nick Gromicko]

John: http://www.nachi.org/convert.htm if it helps.

[Nick Gromicko]

Chris: Is it true that seach engines don't give a hoot about metatags?

[Paul W. Abernathy]

Originally Posted by gromicko

Is it true that seach engines don't give a hoot about metatags?

Nick,

For the most part that is correct, the majority of placement is taking place with title's, page verbage content and so on. Less and less is being put on Meta Tags because they tend to be abused.

Most of the best linked pages have titles that list the major search terms or content that lists the major terms without it being repetative to a point it is considered spam listings.

With that said meta tags should still be used because their are some smaller spiders and none mainstream engines and directories that will still use them in indexing...but the larger ones do not any longer.

[William Warner]

How much flash is too much?

[Chris Morrell, CTO]

I'll talk about meta tags more in the TV show--but I will say that they're pretty much worthless nowadays.

[Nick Gromicko]

Chris, don't search engines use metatags?

[Chris Morrell, CTO]

I think Inktomi/Yahoo is the only search engine that even looks at meta keywords and meta descriptions--and they only give 'em a tiny bit of weight. Meta tags are easily abused, so most search engines have just about dropped 'em from their search algorithms.

[Chris Morrell, CTO]

Anyone else?

[bsumpter]

Heres one I have been dealing with:

What do you do when your 3rd party software that you have used to help 'build' your site, FTP's 90% of the verbiage as images instead of HTML or text?

I feel this is definitely affecting my SE placement.

If I am the only one that is dealing with this issue, I would be surprised.

[Paul W. Abernathy]

Could be the extention you are using on the upload...ASCII or Binary.....could be the problem