updating our website links

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SSSdave
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updating our website links

Post by SSSdave »

Every so often I go into my homepage Links sub-page and update the Internet links listing. Of course links occasionally change as site strutctures change. Government sites are rather notorious in that regard. Thus visitors to one's website may click on such a link and be annoyed to reach a broken link that times out slowly. Annoying enough that a visitor may immediately flee your links offerings and never return. Thus some reason for each of we website maintainers to periodically review what we've presented to the public.

So today I rebuilt my links page doubling the offerings listed. As a long time computer engineering and Internet person, I learned long ago the advantages of making good use of saved links when navigating the web. I wrote all the html for my site so updating the coding on any pages are trivial. On my own home computer, my Windows Favorites directory has a hierarchial structure of 74 folders and over 1400 links. Of course all of we links page builders "borrow" links we find on other sites and I freely admit to snagging a few from some High Sierra Topix members haha.

Since I have a fine art landscape and nature photography site with information about natural history, I limited my list to links that would be of general interest to such visitors. Many are doors to other more comprehensive sites concerned with each site's scope of interest. When creating a link page one ought strike a balance between too many which might be bewildering or boring and too little which will tend to lose potential returnees. They also ought to be thoughtfully listed possibly within sub-categories. I did include a few links to photographers including some on this site. These are a few folks I've actually met, personally traded emails, or had some dealings with. I'll expand that in the future though prefer to limit it to photographers I've actually met.

Cross links between sites are of course rather important for one's website to become prioritized more highly by the large well-known search engines like Google or Yahoo and their army of web crawling bots. There are of course pricy services to buy a site's way into web prominence though the rest of us peon small business sites stumble forward more quietly. It took a couple years before the big search engines really indexed most of my own pages.

To visit my link offering simply select the " Links " field on my homepage.
...David
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copeg
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Post by copeg »

In building my webpages and spending way too much time designing and optimizing them, I have learned a lot about web design, and have also found several tools to help me out. If your not aware of them David, there are several link checkers out there (Xenu, Integrity, etc..) that can help you go through all your site's links in less than a minute finding 404's, 200's, etc... it doesn't substitute for checking the content of those links by hand, but when your site becomes large with many internal links, external links, and links in databases rather than the html code itself, tools like this become very nice :nod:
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