Welcome to Questions of the Week, Episode #2.
Why am I riding a bike you ask? Because Jay said so and he’s the one who asked the questions for this week. 🙂
Ride like the wind… @MikeMueller
— Jay Valento (@hometourjay) June 8, 2015
This week I tackle “What size font should I use on my blog posts?” and
“How should I redirect a subdirectory I have on my website?”
Starting with the font question first.
My friend Jay asked (by commenting on the last post)
A great question, but it’s not as easy as just a font size. There are quite a few things that go into what is called the readability of the text on your site. Font Family is one. Another is the color of the font itself and the color of the background the font is displayed on.
One way of thinking about this is similar to how I am in a restaurant. If you’ve ever seen me looking at a menu, you’ll know first of all, I need my glasses. Next, if the lighting is poor, or the font is small or light you might see me move the menu to somewhere I can get a little more light – I’m looking for better contrast. My glasses are set up perfectly for me reading a well lit computer screen a specific distance away. Change any of those parameters and I need to adapt. Does that make sense?
I would start with your demographic. Are the people reading your blog like me in a dimly lit restaurant? Are they younger, with perfect eyesight? Maybe the best option might be to allow them to change the font size themselves? There are a few plugins you can add that will allow them to do that.
If you are going to change the font size in your site you can do so via CSS. You can change a global setting or you can change just a particular element – it’s up to you. No matter what you do, don’t change your themes CSS,If your theme updates – all your changes will be lost. Instead use a style sheet add-on. Jetpack has a wonderful setting that will allow you to do that.
Question #2: “I see a subdomain when I do a site:redwagonteam.com that I have never seen before or created. How do I redirect it?”
IF you watched the video I totally misunderstood what he was asking.
The first thing I noticed was the colon (:). If you go to Google and search site:yourwebsite.com Google will show you all the current pages it has indexed. This is not a subdomain, it’s a cool search in Google.
If instead it was a dot (.) that would indicate a subdomain. Typically when a developer is building a new version of a site they’ll use a subdomain to work on it in secret, when it’s done they’ll setup a redirect via either a CNAME or A Record and the dev site will now become the LIVE site. Most of the time the developer will call that site dev.thewebsite.com but they can use most any name they want.
That’s what I get for trying to do two things at once. I suck!
What Jay was referring to was a subdomain in his site. Here’s a screen capture of what he sees.
That’s different from what I was thinking he was referring to. Jay is using an 3rd party IDX to bring the MLS to his site. Specifically he’s using Diverse Solutions. The subdomain they setup helps to create fully indexed dynamic pages. When a visitor sees a home in search and clicks to see more, his site dynamically builds a page for that listing. When that happens his sitemap notifies Google and then that page becomes indexed. Jay is a good blogger but I don’t think anyone could really write 291,000 pages of content, right? It’s the IDX (and the people visiting his site) that help create all these pages indexed in Google.
As far as the subdomain itself – it doesn’t go anywhere so instead of redirecting it, I would hide it from Google. When you do, just make sure you don’t screw it up and hide your entire site from Google! (yes, I’ve seen that happen)
That’s it for Questions of the week. If you have something you want me to answer (or answer wrong) just ask – anywhere. I’ll be listening!
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