This is a joke I use from time to time, and it usually gets a smile or two.  Unfortunately it applies to a number of websites I see every day - I'm not sure what to call them, I just hope their owners are getting breakfast!

I said in a post a while back that, in the old days - back when I first began writing websites, pretty much anything would pass for a good website.  We didn't have the technology either to design or be found.  It was the age of the online brochure.  But visitors demand more than just a brochure now.  They need action, movement, help, usefulness.

Sadly, many site owners just don't get it.  The good news for them, is their sites are so badly optimized that most searchers aren't going to ever find them!  What a waste of effort and money.  Whilst hosting is cheap now, having a site designed is usually a costly business.  Not being found is a waste of this money and effort.

Here are some easily fixable mistakes, ones that cost you big time in rankings.

Poor title tags. How often do I see "Home - Mozilla Firefox/Internet Explorer".  This is

It's been a quiet start to the year with our attention in other places for much of it.  However, we've been quietly working away at a number of designs, some of which have been totally rewritten with the advent of the latest Joomla version- 1.6 - which has a whole different architecture to the previous version.

Our latest creation just went live yesterday and you can check out one of Sacramento's only dedicated real estate attornies in Rita Lingwood by following the Sacramento real estate attorney link.  All of us here at CitrusKiwi wish Rita all the best with the new site!

Hey, don't worry, this is not how we treat our clients!  In fact, our whole marketing strategy is built around our giving our client the best service we can.  That's how we can keep them,and still charg elow monthly fees for the great service we offer.

But the purpose of today's post is not to tell you how great we are - after all, what we tell you will be treated with caution anyway - but to introduce you to our latest live site, and our new client Hurt by Love.  Cindy and Doug have a great ministry reaching out to, mostly, abused women in our world, giving them good, solid, practical advice, a listening ear, and a safe haven to find hope.  Cindy is an abuse survivor herself, so doesn't speak out of someone else's experience or from a dry textbook.  Her experience came at a high price.  Doug, her husband, has 23 years, and counting, working behind the walls of a state prison and brings the experience of dealing with abusers and manipulators of all types. His experience is invaluable.

If you are the victim of emotion or verbal abuse, or you know someone who is, this

I don't doubt that all these are repeated elsewhere, in 1000's of pages.  That's the good, and bad thing, of the Internet.  There's a bunch of information.  Unfortunately, especially when it comes to IT, much of it is out of date (or not updated), totally wrong, or written by armchair amateurs.  You know, some of the same ones that clog up the Internet with horrible web pages that start with "Welcome to my page" or similar.

So let's get started......(in no particular order)

1. Bloated files/pages.
This could really be 2 categories.  Firstly bloated pages.  These are the ones stuffed with gigantic pics that allow you to cook dinner, wash the car AND do you shopping while the page loads.  Second are bloated files.  PDF's are great used properly, but they can be big.  I like to offer my visitors the option of saving/opening a PDF, or viewing as a plain HTML page.  Yes it takes more work on the part of the designer, but it's much more user friendly.

2. Visited links that don't change color.
When users have visited somewhere, they like to know it.  Not coding links to change color when they've been clicked is insulting to