Google is a lot like a blind person reading a website: if your site isn’t readable by a screen reader (a piece of adaptive software that enables blind people to navigate the web) Google won’t find it either. While Flash sites look great- they are self-contained files that don’t have searchable content.
To find out what Google has indexed on your site- go to Google, type in “site:yourURL.com” (or .org, .biz etc) and you will be presented with a list of pages with details about each page- this is what Google knows of your site.

Because Search engines can easily return a million hits, getting your site to the front page isn’t something that happens by accident. But search engines evolve constantly- and that means that your site has to as well. Because the amount of information being added to the Internet daily is huge (I’ve heard over a terabyte a day) search engines are quite busy indexing new information as it is added. So- if you want results, adding content daily will help your site keep the search bots coming back.

How much is that top of search results worth? This is where web stats packages can really help you put things into perspective. If you aren’t looking at your webstats at least once a week, you are missing some of your most valuable business intelligence data available. How many unique visitors did your site have this month? How long did people stay on your site? What keywords or keyphrases did they use to find you? What websites were they referred from? All of these pieces of data can help you make your marketing better- and your site get you a higher return for your investment.

What can, or should a web site do for you? I had a client in my office yesterday, we are about the same age- and we couldn’t remember how to spell the name of a local bar- she went looking for a local free weekly paper because they advertise there, I went to the web. I found the answer faster- and it cost the bar less to reach a much larger audience than that ad did. So- if you are looking at your ad budget- and especially the Yellow Pages advertising expense- and compare that to the costs of having just an informational site up- you start to see the price/value equation. If you don’t have a site that allows people to find you quickly- and have current info on the site- you are missing a huge opportunity.

So, what is the most important secret of building a website that works? You have to be able to edit, update and control it yourself- no farming it out to some web geek. The beauty of WordPress is it is as simple as Microsoft Word- to publish instantly to the web. WordPress allows you to publish, edit, manage a web site that is totally search engine and screen reader compatible, and that gives you features like RSS and interaction as part of a simple package. Your site will rise to the top of Google based upon the content of your site, not upon your budget for design.

Roles and Capabilities « WordPress Codex

Since WordPress 2.0 came out, I’ve been meaning to look this up. Since I handle all of the content management on most of the sites I’m involved in, I’m always logged in at the admin level. However, WordPress 2.0 has a refined version with 5 levels of access – that allows groups to edit and post together.

For an organization with many people who can contribute- a blog/site can risk changing it’s voice from post to post. Imagine reading the New York Times and having some articles posted by a writer from USA Today- it would stick out like a sore thumb. So- the administrator or higher level access people can serve as editors- making sure nothing goes public that isn’t in style.

Another function is hiding some content from the masses- having some content visible only to people who have been granted higher level access. This is ideal for sites that may be used to communicate to an internal audience as well as an external one- or for a fan club- that get’s access to special info.

The codex link above spells out these roles. This is just one other way that Word Press makes it’s easy to build a site that is more powerful than a conventionally built static HTML site.

Owen Winkler has built a plug-in for WordPress 2.0 to allow you to modify the roles- you can find it here: http://redalt.com/wiki/Role+Manager 

WordPress Development Blog › 2.0.2 Security Release

This just in- there has been a security update to WordPress. The beauty of Open Source software is once again revealed- the people who found the problem chose to report it to the developers- instead of exploiting it with a virus or other malware.

If WordPress was a Microsoft product- it wouldn’t work this way.

We typically recommend waiting a day or two before updating- since sometimes, updates cause other problems.