I’m learning a lot with a new site I’m working on – http://www.impactsalaska.com. Christie had designed a static site and was used to typing “impactsalaska.com” into her Google search bar to get to her site. I have found this is not an uncommon practice. Anyway, after I converted her to a WordPress site, mysteriously the listing in Google disappeared. Christie was the first to notice, since that was the way she normally traveled to get to her site. I looked in all the obvious places to see what was causing the problem:

• I looked at her hosting to be sure there weren’t any strange settings in Networks Solutions. Everything looked fine there.
• I deleted her old content in case duplicate content was offending the googlebots.
• I cleaned up the robots.txt file.
• I installed a plug in on WordPress that would automatically submit a sitemap to the search engines.
• I created an account on Google Webmaster Tools and saw that the site had been completely dropped from Google indexing.
• I posted a question on the Google Webmaster Help Discussion group asking for advice.
• Someone on the group suggested I redirect the old pages with a 303 permanent redirect in the .htaccess file, so I did that.
• I resubmitted a requested for reconsideration and waited.

Well, how long are you supposed to wait on a non-existant Google helpdesk? I waited a couple of days. My client was understandably perturbed. Finally, I posted again on the Discussion group – which had now closed and moved to http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en. I believe I now have the answer I overlooked: the Privacy setting in WordPress. I hope to report back tomorrow with an index listing in Google!

I’ve seen this problem before when you have several tall images all aligned to the left. What is happening is the images are so tall they just keep trying to stay left aligned until they don’t fit across the page anymore (it’s part of the coding in the design that filters the way your site looks). What you need to be able to do is tell the next image to “clear” the left alignment and to start on a new line with an HTML tag. It is a bit of a glitch with WordPress as far as I can tell, so you have to outsmart it. Here’s how:

1. Switch to the HTML mode (the code) by clicking the HTML tab.
2. Then wherever you want a new line before each image that is having the problem, you’ll put the following text:
   <div style=”clear:both;”></div>
3. Then you need to publish the post and check it by viewing the site.

There’s a gotcha to watch out for – if you go back into Visual mode from HTML mode without publishing, the <div style=”clear:both;”></div> tag disappears. This happens with several different HTML tags – it’s a bit squirrelly.

So I’m working on my new site – www.vcfmrp.net – and we want to display graduate data on a map. Sounds simple enough. Where do I turn first? Well, google maps, of course. I figure, real estate websites use them all the time to display houses for sale. How hard could it be?

I fiddle and fiddle with google API. What I learn is that this is going to be awfully slow to load with more than a few data points. Plus, it’s just ugly.

I run across this article: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/takecontrolofyourmaps – and I couldn’t agree more. This morning I will shop for other options. So far, I like the idea of buying a flash map that someone else built and modify it (http://www.fla-shop.com/us_states/usa_silver.php) – for $45, this will save my client money, and it looks nice. http://mapnik.org also looks like a nice option, but may be overkill for what we are doing. Stay tuned for the results…