Deverill

Don's exactly right. Google may hit a home page or a well-connected page a couple times a day but it will only follow all of your links and see every page (what they call a "deep crawl") once a month or less usually. It could also be someone's browser or another spider calling itself googlebot too. You never know.

It's good here - Florida w/BellSouth DSL. If this is a brand new site it may be some problem with DNS propogation... but that's a reach.

To be honest, my first impression before I found the datacenter pages was that TCH was a British presence. I didn't care because it was fast, cheap and good, unlike the sign I saw on a programmer's desk that read "Good, cheap, fast - pick any two." I'm in the States so I didn't vote but with the number of countries with bad telephone infrastructure it may be a blessing that we are hosted here... but I don't know so don't mind me.

Thanks for the extra space guys. (Now everyone that was a bit pushy about the upgrades remember that in the off chance a server gets slowed down from this you have to wait 30 minutes to complain instead of the normal 15 minute response time the tech guys give us.)

I think a magazine author is stretching pretty far for a story. Yes, the security control panel could be spoofed, but so could the login screen. Welcome to Windows XP, login: is just as easy to exploit and can be done on any system given proper access. To paraphrase CNN Headline news about Linux "Give me root for 30 minutes and I'll rule your world." The real thing to watch is to see if SP2 has the same level of exploitability as SP1 so that someone could get in and install the security panel spoofer from outside. Let's hope not.

For Kasey and others, Steve has a lot of java buttons and lines like: ><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Some text </strong></font> that could be drastically reduced by using CSS. It's the normal fluff that a lot of editors put in with doing all that on each line instead of just once for a section or, even better, using CSS to define the defaults.

If you pay monthly you can cancel at any time with no problem. If you pay a year in advance it involves refunds and it's a little more involved but you could cancel that too. In your case the monthly payment is best.

The numbers I have heard for the front page is about 10-15 seconds. This changes if your page is written such that the visitor can start reading before all the pictures download for example. If they don't get something useful in the first 10 seconds they usually start peeling off for other sites.

This is why it's important for us all to keep our information up to date on our accounts when we get new credit cards, etc. The same thing happens to me with Columbia House CDs and my electric bill when the bank sends me a new card... it's bad that the late fees are added by these places, but it is my fault for not updating my info. At least TCH doesn't charge us late fees. I recommend keeping a calendar and every time you use a card for a reocurring bill, write the name of the company in the space on the calendar for the day your current card expires so when that day gets here you can look at the calendar and know who you have to tell about the new date. It's a little too organized for some folks tastes but it will help you keep up with all your accounts whether TCH or otherwise.

Yeah, headache for sure. From what I've read, query strings aren't a problem as long as there are not too many parameters and you're not using session IDs. The session ID makes a problem for the spiders it seems. You definitely want to have pictures of food! I love pictures of food. Ok, ok, I love food period! The secret is to design it so that you can have some good content as well or bring in search engine folks another way. I don't think of my stuff as exceptional in any way, but to see what I did when I got rid of the splash page check out www.grandslamkw.com and see how I managed to get some boat and water photos in with quite a bit of content. Again, not an example of greatness, just one thing that I did that seems to work pretty well. Remember too that you usually don't "sell" from your home page. Perhaps a small (half page or less) but very enticing photo will hook them and then when they go to see the chicken products or prepared foods or whatever else categories you may have for your particular products you can really wow them with a huge pic or collage of all the things in that classification and then go on to more pages of smaller photos and spiderable text. You, or anyone else here, are more than welcome to PM me. If it's something I can do I will be glad to help as much as I can.

You are totally right, and it's not just Europe! Here in the States I'm seeing a huge percentage of visitors using IE and you are right, we can't afford to just ignore them.

The laws are ineffective in a world where anonymity is easy and organizations like the RIAA have to file lawsuits against "John Doe" or "Jane Roe" because of it. As for it makes me think of the old saying about gun control. If you make a law against owning guns or spamming then the honest, law-abiding people will not have guns or send spam. That means the only ones that have guns or spam, as the case may be, will be the ones breaking the laws... but the laws won't stop them from doing it. It's unfortunate that we even have this problem, but I'm afraid the only way we will ever get rid of it is to totally restructure how emails work and give up some of our freedoms - a thought I am not very happy about.

One more thing to be careful of if you take this approach is that duplicate content on multiple pages is an easy way to get one or all pages dropped from the search engines. As for backlinks, this really only applies to Google. The others look at links from other sites but don't put nearly enough weight on it to be successful with that being your only beneficial feature. This is the very reason I removed all splash pages from my sites and refuse to use them now unless one of my clients wants to pay me well for it and accept low rankings... which they aren't. They look really nice, but how many books would you buy at the bookstore if they had no words on the cover and only nice pictures? How would you even know what they are about? It's very much the same with web sites.

Just a tiny thing. The script is processed by the TCH server your site lives on and it sends the email, not Google. Just wanted to clear it up a bit. I'm glad it's working for you now.

Different engines use different criteria to decide how our pages rank. With Yahoo, they put more weight on what's called on-page elements: title, heading content, alt attributes, etc. With Google, for example, they put more value on normal content and how many folks link to you than Yahoo does. The most likely cause of the drop is being offline. If a spider hits a dead end it may reduce your rank or remove you entirely. Another common cause is that the search engine changed the way they count things in the algorithm that ranks stuff. Maybe they think "Hey, the title tag is being abused, let's make it less important." It is normal for sites to fluxuate daily even within the search engines - some more so than others. It may even be that 20 other pages did something right to get them placed above you in the results. (Let's hope not. ) Finally, depending on what you removed it could be that. If you removed what Yahoo considers important then they may lower your rank. If you only removed some big photos or something like that then it's not as likely to be the problem. With search engines you have to look at averages over large periods of time rather than "I reworded my title and 3 days later I dropped 5 places" because of the nature of how the engines work and the hundreds of things they look at.

IE and it's poor implementation of CSS rendering is one reason I hate it. As a web developer, though, I can't just ignore it even if I never use it for my own browsing needs. A perfect example: I just spent all my free time over the past 2 days (not that much time but enough!) trying to find out how to center a page using CSS. By the standards you just tell it to automatically adjust the left and right margins. Under IE there are suggestions to make the margin 50% and then back it up by half the size of your page or to set everything to center and then turn right around and uncenter the insides of the box. Stupid pet tricks to make it work as it should. And then they don't work with IE5.x! Too bad so many are still on IE that we developers can't just ignore it like we do NS 3

Ah, I see what you mean. It is a poor choice of words for sure. You may want to go to Raul's page at borfast.com using IE just for fun. He does a much better job of explaining why IE is evil and why we should use something else.

Thomas, It's not so much that IE is outdated as it is that IE is not "standards compliant". Microsoft still doesn't understand that when international groups like W3C come up with a standard it is important for them to make their browsers follow that standard. Microsoft still thinks they can do whatever they want in whatever way they want without any problems but people like Mozilla are showing them it's not true.

Shew, I'm sure glad I said "I don't think". Thanks for the definitive answer, Bruce.

Hi Glen and welcome. We have many folks from the UK here so I'm sure you'd have no problems with your site. We even have some techy guys from there so the time zone issue is not an issue usually. I'll answer the questions I know: 2. We do not have fantastico. 3. We are currently on Cpanel Version/Build 9.4.1-STABLE Build 65 on my server and I think they are all kept the same. 4. Yes, just point your DNS (nameservers) to TCH and they'll get the visitor to your site. Now for the unsure: 1. I don't think any extensions are blocked. I'm sure someone else will be along shortly to fill in the gaps. Best wishes in finding a host and we will look forward to welcoming you as part of our family here if you choose TCH!

Robb, Thanks for being honest about it. Some would come in denying everything and you didn't so kudos for that. I obviously can't speak for management, but my recommendation would be to be patient. Since it's the weekend the help desk may be a little slower on your request. If they chose not to let you have your stuff or if they had already deleted it I am confident they would say so. Either way, a non-answer is not the same as "no".

And if you put all of the pieces in does that mean you are voting for the Reverend Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition?

Definitions are a funny thing. For example, I had jimscomputing.com with another host before I came here. When I shut it down there and moved it here I transferred my "domain" (jimscomputing.com) to TCH. I didn't change the registrar so I didn't transfer my "domain name registration". That's the problem in computer stuff sometimes, we get too technical with the names of things and anyone new to the field gets totally confused. In this case it is correct to say that you can ignore this if you are creating a new domain here, but "if you have transferred your domain" from another host you must change the DNS, but it can be confusing to a newcomer.

Sorry about that - it was indeed Freehand. See how much I use it?

I've purposely avoided the reviews because everyone has an opinion and I wanted to come to my own. On August 12th I got the upgrade for IT folks to put on many computers. It is not the one downloaded via Windows Updates but it should be about the same. I installed it that night on my home computer and have not had any problems with it since. Everything is running smoothly and I have seen no issues yet. Call me reckless but it has been good to me.