The Christian Chronicle, one of the largest international news publications of the Churches of Christ, has selected Travis Langley & Associates for the redesign and development of their new website and customized content management system (CMS). The goal is to provide a more intuitive layout, better navigation and a greatly improved end-user experience. The new site will also make available several new features for members and subscribers. In addition, an improved CMS will ease management of the site, provide for the automation of several tasks, and help incorporate new functionality into the site.

Travis Langley & Associates will also provide the Christian Chronicle with tools for improved ad serving and managment, for encouraging and managing online membership, and for increasing revenue through strategic relationships.

Launch of the new site is expected in December 2007.

Visit the Christian Chronicle online at www.christianchronicle.org

It’s been awhile since my last post, and that means business has been good. I have a series of great new client projects to work, and that has kept me pretty busy. However, I needed a break from the layout and coding, so I thought I would add a new entry to the blog. This one deals with the use, or lack of use, of www on your sites URL, how it can affect your search engine rankings, and what you can do to correct the issue.

First, what really is the issue with using www or not you might ask. For one, it’s an issue of what is the best URL to serve for a given web page, otherwise referred to as canonicalization. Most of us would consider the following to be the same thing:

grademyshades.com
www.grademyshades.com
www.grademyshades.com/index.htm

Actually, the list could be a lot longer, and in this case these all point to the same page… but they don’t have to. Each of these URLs could actually represent a different page, and that’s how the search engines see it, as different pages. Just check out the following image for reference:

Notice above how Google has listed both grademyshades.com and www.grademyshades.com as two separate listings. So what’s the big deal? The deal is two-fold. First, search engines don’t like duplicate content and will very often hand out penalties because of it. This is exactly how the search engines see this - as duplicate content - two different pages with identical information and this is something you should definitely avoid. Second, search engines place a lot of weight on links from other sites to your pages. Let’s say that some of those links include the www in the url, and some do not. You are essentially splitting those links up between what the search engine sees as two different pages, and neither version of your page will rank as well as if all those links were pointed to the same page.

Good news, there is a simple fix that essentially makes the non-www version non existent. Just add the following bit of code to your .htaccess file (place in the root directory of your website - and replace domain.com with your domain) :

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

What this does is redirect any requests for the non-www version of you site to use the www version. It also issues a 301 permanent redirect code, so that the search engines will know to only index the www version. And there you have it - 2 simple lines of code to prevent or help correct what could be a big problem for your search engine optimization efforts.

Want more information on the subject? Here’s a good link from an industry insider on the subject of canonical urls (primarily from a google point of view) that should help answer more questions.