I recently finished up a design project for Bristlecone Realty, a salt lake property management company I found through a friend.  It was a fun project, a clean, simple design with some embedded PHP and HTML elements that they could use with a WYSIWYG editor to make changes on the site they update frequently.

They also wanted some SEO work done and so I have also been tackling that this summer with the most mixed, unusual results I have ever had with SEO.   I am optimizing for the keyword string “salt lake property management” and right now they are sitting at #1 for MSN, #32 for Yahoo, and nowhere on Google.  Yup, one day we were steadily climbing around #45-50 and the next day it was delisted…why?  I have no idea.  I submitted a reconsideration form and am waiting on that.

A weird thing to happen when there appears to be nothing black hat at all about the site.  I scoured over every inch of the HTML and found only a period that was “hidden” to hold space in an area that was showing up differently in FF and IE.  I removed that and am now just waiting for Google to give the page back its proper place.

Meanwhile, you can check out the page at http://www.brgsaltlake.com

I went to a concern a few nights ago…Nada Surf was the main band.  The opener, Tim Fite was a dude in blue, cut-off overall singing some of the weirdest stuff I’d ever heard.  It was a cross between Salad Fingers and Weird Al.  Crazy at is sounds, I liked it…really.  The dude was so crazy eccentric that it was fun, I have no idea why.

So, sometimes I create a website or product or whatever that is logically perfect and smart…and it turns out average.  Sometimes I see a product or website that makes me scratch my head and wonder why moron spent 10 minutes on this one…and then notice that is in the top 20,000 in Alexa’s rankings and kicks the trash out of all my sites.

So why do they work?  I dunno…I honestly don’t.

Checking the stats for my site today I noticed a few visitors coming from a new URL…this one actually http://www.hardnewscafe.usu.edu/ archive/april2008/ 041708_snow.html which turned out to be an article about yours truly.  A friend of mine had written an aritcle last semester for a project and I assumed it never got published…yet lo and behold, here it is!

Just to fill y’alls in, the Hard News Cafe is a worldwide source for the latest and greatest in news.   Hundreds of people each year pour over the stories…never to read it again.  Well, this found of knowledge is now complete after being graced by my name earlier this year.

Althought a few of the facts are a little bit off, its still fun to see my name up in lights…no matter how small.

Another lunchtime post for y’alls.  A quick list of random numbers from the last little bit of my life:

0 – number of days I drove my car last work week
1 – number of months left till I move back to Logan
3 – number of times in the last week I have been mistaken for a mormon missionary
15 – number of bologna sandwhiches i have eaten in the last week
26 – miles I rode my bike on Saturday
31 – number of days left till I move back to Logan
59 – number of cents required to purchase pistachio pudding
189 – cost of my trip to Las Vegas in a few weeks
744 – number of hours left till I move back to Logan
1,194 – errors in my registry or bits of adware on my computer found during a system cleanup on my old laptop