New site status update.

Gregory Brine’s site is going through a bit of a re-vamp at the moment. The old site, at www.gregorybrine.com has been live for a while now, and I felt like re-developing it to have a more web 2.0 design and feel, which is where this new site comes in.

This was my recent blog on printing the web for Wiliam for anyone that fancies a read

This blog is written about predominately about Brine in it’s many facets. The actually aim is as an SEO test. I’m trying to see if I can push my surname, Brine, to rank higher in the search engines.

For the first time this month, my website’s had more than 10,000 visitors in a month. Actually, it passed 12,000 too (If anyone cares for precision, it was 12,478). Ok, so all my friends are now groaning, but to me, that’s a pretty impressive number for a personal website that’s not selling anything.

So why do i think this happened? Partly due to re-writing the code of the site to be more search engine friendly. Partly re-writing the content to be more relevant – and to those who keep pointing it out, one day I will fill in the gaps. Posting articles and comments on forums and news sites around the web. And I’ve been updating the site a lot more regularly. Writing blogs, uploading images, just trying to keep the site fresh and interesting to those that follow, and perhaps a few out there just randomly wandering the web.

So, what’s next for www.gregorybrine.com? Well, when I get time, I’m starting to re-write it in Microsoft’s Asp .NET. As part of that, the galleries are getting an overhaul, and some friends are interested in combining sites – that could be interesting and fun. Oh, and I might move it to new, cheaper hosting… We’ll see. It’s all about having time, and a desire to finish at work, then sit in front of a computer doing more of the same… Hmmm… Let me think about that… I think I just heard the pub calling….

I started reading an article on Rohit Bhargava’s Influential Interactive Marketing site about changing our approach to SEO, so that it works better with Social Networks. The original post has since been added to, and the finally summary of the 16 rules can be found on the Online Marketing Blog website. For me, this is very interesting as we were discussing at work the influence these networks will be having in the future, especially as they can really help to build brand awareness and loyalty, and as sites like Wikipedia start to lose their influence within search engines as their algorithms are updated and PageRanks recalculated.

In my new job, working for the Sydney web design agency Wiliam, I’ve become involved in the search engine optimisation of our client’s sites and thought I’d try and filter it through to my new site.

Video on the iPod? What’s the point in that?

…but not as we know it! The imprecise art of search engine optimisation?