I have finally got my finger out and done my own design and theme for my site. Instead of just reusing someone else’s theme and having a site that looks like every other blog on the net I have created this unique little design. It is not 100% finished yet as I need to do some tinkering to add in some of the extra functionality and it has also not yet been tested with Internet Explorer. It looks best in Chrome and Safari but Firefox and Opera are not far behind. However the site needs JavaScript enabled in Opera because it doesn’t support certain CSS3 styles. As I already block IE6 users from the site I haven’t bothered making it compatible with that trash browser. IE7 and IE8 should work more or less the same as Opera and thus will need JavaScript enabled.

Here is a shout out to Mr Anthony McLaughlin for the help and advice with the design. Especially for the advice on the use of colour and leading me to that very funky font. Us programmers need all the help we can get with design.

Let me know your thoughts and comments below. Also if you spot any bugs or where I have overlooked some styles please let me know.

This is the first in a series of articles where I address some of the myths that have become part of the smoke and mirrors that is the area of search engine optimisation (SEO). Some of these are outright falsehoods, others are misunderstandings and some were true but aren’t any more. See I am capable of writing articles that are more than mindless rants and I do have a day job.

ASP.NET websites use a hidden form field to store what is called the Viewstate. This is simply encoded information detailing what has occurred on the page since it is loaded. It is an attempt to add state to the stateless. How successful it is at doing so depends on your point of few but that is not the subject of this article. There has been some contention on whether this view state negatively effects the search engine friendliness of a web site. To the point the Internet is awash with howtos detailing the steps need to move or remove it. The notion is that because the Viewstate is at the top of the body and because search engines only read a certain amount of the HTML body that Viewstates encoded gibberish pushes out search engine optimised content. This your SEO consultant will, for a small fee, tell you is bad. But is it?

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