Some Changes at LiftedLeg
It’s just over a year since I took LiftedLeg live, so it’s time to review, fix and change a few things about the place.
In terms of appearance, there is no significant change — just some tinkering here and there to make things more usable. Ultimately, I’m happy with the stark and stripped-back design; it does what’s needed and, as we now say, is not too shabby! Better still, it loads super quickly and is easy to navigate.
The main change is around the GreatLinks page(s) where I was previously holding the same information in two places - never a good idea. Now, the GreatLinks are available only as separate pages and are no longer tagged as LinkOfTheWeek. This results in less confusion and less work.
I’ve also changed the search results page to display only the results; previously, it also showed links to all the pages on the site below any results.
On pages where it may not be obvious, I’m now including the tag/page type (Review/GreatLinks/Feature, etc.) along with the publication date to clarify the relevance of the content.
I’ve changed the red colour of links/text from #FF6347 to #FF5C3D to improve colour contrast and, hence, accessibility. Another tick in the box.
There is also a change under the hood regarding titles and search engines.
Google has always ranked us — particularly for our timely release of reviews — and we usually hit the first page alongside the big newspapers. However, Bing, whose results many third parties like DuckDuckGo use, has struggled to link to us, certainly not in anything like a timely manner. Given that Bing grossly lags behind Google in market share (4% vs 94%!), you’d think they would prioritise helping websites understand why they might not list them quickly, but not a bit of it - they are beyond obtuse in the information they provide to webmasters.
Anyway, in the absence of solid information, and for the techies among you, I’m hoping a change in the way I use H1 HTML tags (best use covered here) will improve our situation with Bing. Actually, I couldn’t care less about Bing, but I would very much like us to be listed properly on Qwant, Startpage (both EU-hosted), and DuckDuckGo (even if they have <1% market share).