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Jeroen Dekker (photography) on-line

Jeroen Dekker, a friend and photographer, has recently, on May the 5th, put his website on concert photography on-line. (Go check it out! He has some great pictures there.)

I was very flattered when I was asked by Jeroen to give some SEO advice in the test stage of his website. I was even happier when I saw how well he had implemented my suggestions. In his concert photography section, he now has links consisting of the event name and the band name and the number of the photo. An example URL: http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/noordschok-2007/prey-band/1/. Also his page titles follow the same structure. As is often the case with SEO, the best results are acquired by remembering that good URLs are URLs which are cool enough that you won’t want to change the in the future and that good titles are titles which look good anywhere, be it in a bookmark or a search result.

Jeroen Dekker concert photography Jeroen Dekker news

I also noticed that, following some evangelizing on semantics and CSS from me, he had greatly cleaned up the HTML markup. Some pages could still profit from some bettermore pedantic markup though. An example from the news section (cleaned up for readability):

<p> The following bands played:<br>
 - <a href="http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/fear-dark-festival-hedon-12-mei-2007/eluveitie-band/">Eluveitie</a><br>
 - <a href="http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/fear-dark-festival-hedon-12-mei-2007/thy-majestie-band/">Thy  Majestie</a><br>
 - <a href="http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/fear-dark-festival-hedon-12-mei-2007/drottnar-band/">Drottnar</a><br>
 
 - <a href="http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/fear-dark-festival-hedon-12-mei-2007/whispering-gallery-band/">Whispering Gallery</a><br>
</p>

In my opinion, the above is a very awkward way to define what is really an unordered list:

<p>The following bands played:</p>
<ul>
  <li><a href="http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/fear-dark-festival-hedon-12-mei-2007/eluveitie-band/">Eluveitie</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/fear-dark-festival-hedon-12-mei-2007/thy-majestie-band/">Thy  Majestie</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/fear-dark-festival-hedon-12-mei-2007/drottnar-band/">Drottnar</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/fear-dark-festival-hedon-12-mei-2007/whispering-gallery-band/">Whispering Gallery</a></li>
</ul>

Finally, a nice touch that I noticed on his site is that he doesn’t have explicit pagination. By this I mean that clicking on the page 2 link simply takes you to the first photo on that page, so that he needs only an URL for each photo and not an URL for each page or even photoset.

5 Comments

  1. Jeroen Dekker

    Master Rowan, I just changed the bad bad bad list into a good good good list!
    Also I took maestro Wiebe’s advice and changed the menu so now it grows with fontsize…
    Is there some other advice you could give your humble follower to make him follow your illuminated standards more? Or maybe even tell me how to improve my website more..

    Humble greetings,
    Jeroen

  2. Rowan Rodrik

    What is that strange noise? Is that the sound of my exploding ego?

  3. Jeroen Dekker

    Humbly though proud again I seek to be in thyne digital presence master,
    Today I spoke to a guy who pointed me out these nice links, with which I upgraded my webpage even more into standards! For instance I use doctype now :$ He told me that might get my site higher at the google listings.
    I still wonder why google doesn’t place me higher in the dutch version, because in the english version it places me nearly on top when searching for ‘jeroen dekker’…

  4. Jeroen Dekker

    Ah, damn, I forgot to post the links, here they are:
    The css validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
    and the html validator: http://validator.w3.org/
    Perhaps you knew these tools, I didn’t 🙂

  5. Rowan Rodrik

    Indeed, I know these tools. You might want to install the Web Developer extension for Firefox to always have them at your fingertips.

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