Google admitted earlier this month that page size matters. Apart from missing out on the less than three second attention span of site visitors, heavy pages can now cause your AdWord advertisements to be placed lower in the ranking. This makes sense from their point of view as clicks mean revenue and one click that takes forever to download the page will reduce the number of clicks and the revenue.

Find out more about why heavy, slow loading web pages do not make sense, and what else may affect your search ranking in our web knowledge area

Check your page sizes here

The second of the holiday blogs. Now flown to Antalya via Turkish Airlines who are like Aer Lingus a decade ago … homely flight attendants and unlimited small bottles of noxious wine, a free newspaper and squeaky leather seats. Another interesting booking process.  If I don’t do something on holiday I just sneak the laptop into the beachbag and make myself thoroughly unpopular. So as a rule it is walk, ski or ride. This was walk. No time to DIY and of course inside knowledge is key, maps are not a strong Turkish forte..

Googled walking holiday turkey  and took number one – most people do. Number 4 was old favourite Sherpa but we don’t do escorted (except in Moroccan Atlas where a mule is useful and they tend to come with a nice man..). Our eventual host was www.jonnyturk.com  who featured nowhere on Google as his adwords did not target Ireland. With a bit of work they could do better on search and keep the World Walks commission, they need:

• A generic domain name www.turkishwalkingholidays.com or www.turkeywalkingholidays.com both of which are surprisingly available 
• Dump frames construction
• Add proper meta content description and html page title to all pages
• Work on inbound links
• Submit a site map to google to demonstrate his rich content
• Sandra to double their click through rate on AdWords

But hey I am happy that they continue to focus on perfect service, driving us to the walk start – picking us up at the end, testing the new chef, introducing us to nice bars, frowning at my laptop when it appears at meal times…booking the hammam for the longest toughest 20km of my life… I can live with that. The rest you can read about on the Lycian  Way Blog…. when I get the confirmation of my admission to forum… eventually….

The road to hell is paved with good intentions but what geek blogs on holiday? Last week was spent in Istanbul enjoying the wedding of Karin (SitesToGo Holland) and Hakan – our favourite Joomla developer. The next will be walking stretches of the Lycian way. So  how to make an interesting internet point about this experience? Well, travel and tourism is one of the most mature Internet markets and second only to pornography in scale. So there should be a story here…

Choosing an Istanbul hotel was interesting (and actually very successful). First step Google ’boutique hotel Istanbul’ not really great as mostly returned consolidator agencies, not hotels own sites. Then tried a few in Trip Advisor . Gave offline travel agent Emer of McDermot travel a list – she came back with another list which I ignored for a few weeks. Then things got urgent so I went back to Trip Advisor and checked out her list – in the end booked Hotel Tashkonak through their own website.

You want to do Istanbul? Then this hotel is the greatest of the mid range boutique timber mansions for which the old city is rightly famous. Friendly is too small a word for the hospitality, but practical too – fellow guests walking through the old city early evening were tailed to the hotel by would be muggers but a sharp eyed shopkeeper tipped off the hotel and we were quite impressed by the security cameras fitted the following afternoon.  Three days is enough for Istanbul unless of course you have a wedding to go to…

Last week was a good week for SitesToGo. The longest serving members of our team Adrian Murphy and Sandra Moody both gained new certification in their areas.

Sandra has long been a whizz at organic search engine optimising but only took to Google AdWords Management a year or so ago. last week she took her Google exam and is now a Google Advertising Professional.

Adrian, like many developers working in the open source community, learned his not inconsiderable php development skills on the job and outside a certified environment. He flew through his Zend certification one morning before work. No surprise we always knew he was great!

We are proud of our two year Excellence Through People Award. All SitesToGo team members have written into their contract that 5% of working time is spent on training or ‘learning’ activities but its hard to find good external certified courses in Ireland. Suzanne (who is taking on the challenge of development training) is going to the UK for a basic Html course because we could find nothing in Ireland other than Dreamweaver stuff.