Been mulling things over and have come up with a way to learn that excites me: I’m going to try to apply the things we’re learning in our Findability class to a real world project I need to do. The project is my psychotherapy site. I built it before I ever started taking classes at the Art Institute so the coding is a mess. No. A MESS. A peek under the hood would be an embarrassment. However, it generally ranks fairly high in Google and my referrals have increased exponentially as a result of the site.

There are several objectives I’d like to accomplish with this. Some of the tasks I have in mind will give me some answers I’ve been wanting for my site; some will help me learn the findability class material better; most will do both. One of the problems with my site is that I’ve been afraid to change anything because I haven’t wanted to mess up my search engine ratings. However, there are some changes I’ve really been wanting to make on the site so using this class as an opportunity to learn seems like a great idea. Here are the objectives:

• I’ve been wanting to transfer my site to a different hosting company but I haven’t known how (or if) that will affect my site’s search engine ratings.
• When I first created the site, the domain name I chose was bend-in-the-river.com. I published the site with that domain and then a bit later, decided to also use susanlitton.com. Since the site was already up, I ended up putting susanlitton.com as an alias. I’d like to switch that out — have susanlitton.com as the main domain name and bend-in-the-river as the alias. Will that change affect my ratings?
• I also thought that at some point, I’d like to convert the site from HTML to PHP, but again, I haven’t known if that would mess things up.
• If I decide to include the site in my portfolio, it’s going to need major overhaul. In fact, although the content and the overall site architecture are still OK and I’d keep most of the images, I’d probably have to do pretty much everything else from scratch. How will that affect the ratings?
• I’d like to use some of the tips and tools we’ve been studying in class to find out all I can about what is and what isn’t working to help people find my site.

So . . . several questions to research and then some activities to do.