I have some very old websites. Some were designed in the late 90′s. That seems like ancient history now. Most of them still do pretty well traffic-wise. Yet they seem to be drifting lower and lower in the search engines. To discover why this might be, I recently took a hard look at a couple of my sites. My, oh, my, what a mess!

When I first started out, I used a WYSIWYG editor from M-Soft that was an add-on to Word. “Holy Mixed Up Code Batman!” For some reason there are no header tags. Lots of center tags. All the code is in caps. No tags were closed unless absolutely necessary. AAAAAAghggh!

I decided to try to manually clean some of it up. I spent a day and a half on one site The Real Man’s Cookbook. Which is the online version of my best selling (for me) published work. I’m not sure if it’s worth slogging through. As it is the changes are not even cosmetic. That would take weeks.

What it really needs is a thorough re-design. But I have so many projects already in mind that this one will have to wait.