I have observed many of my readers are not into all this blogging stuff. These people often hit the front page, read the first ten items there, and run away — thinking that’s all there is. This is a big shame on my part, as it clearly means I’m not helping my readers to find my content.

So I’ve been working on ways to make it easier for the Mr. & Mrs Non-Techie Joes to quickly find their way around this website. Here are some of the current navigational aids:

1. Archives Page: The archives page lists all the past journal entries, neatly arranged in reverse chronological order. Note that this page lists only the journal entires (powered by WordPress), and doesn’t include those pages outside the WordPress system
2. I’ve got some really neat hacks and guides coming soon. These will live outside the journal, but will have a clear navigation on the left like this Einstein collection and the great quotes
3. Site Search: Look up, to the right. I’ve just built a search tool for this site, using Google’s Custom Search Engine solution. This should be the easiest way to quickly locate any information around here
4. Pagination: I’ve also implemented a numbered pagination system at the bottom of all archive pages of the journal. See, for instance, the front page of the journal.

I’m still tinkering around over here. My goal is to make it dead simple for everyone to quickly find their way around this website. If I’ve gone through the trouble of writing something, I’ve got to do all it takes to make it easy for people to find what I write.

Mine is apparently worth US$5,000. That’s the price the poor fellow who owns the domain name “appiah.com” is asking for at BuyDomains.com. The other two generic flavours “appiah.org” and “appiah.net” are owned by another Appiah, Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University.

While I’m glad I own my name [georgeappiah.com], I obviously cannot share this with my family, if I ever happen to have one. So I was hoping to grab the last name, but it looks like was too late to the game. Actually I didn’t expect this generic domain name to be available, and I was willing to buy it, if the price was right. But US$5,000 does not smell right at all to me.

Of course, some domain names have sold for millions of dollars (“sex.com” reportedly sold for 2m), but I didn’t know my last name was this valuable

When I first registered the domain georgeappiah.com for this website, one of my goals was to control my identity online. I knew that while I couldn’t control what someone would write about me, I could have much say in what people discovered about me through a web search. And I wanted to make it easy for people to find what I wanted them to find about — about me.

So after many turns and twists and two fatal database crashes, today if you google “George Appiah” (without quotes), you’ll find information about me all over. At the time of this writing, the entire first page results (1-10 web pages) were all about me. In fact, but for a few usurpers, the entire initial 100 websites (first ten SERPS) would have been about me.

Obviously I’ve more than exceeded that particular goal of controlling my online identity, even though — I will confess — I’ve not done a decent job at building one coherent personal brand yet. More about that later.

But I want more, ya know. I’m up with another goal, this time a more specific and measurable goal: I want to be the #1 on the search result page for the name “Appiah”. Here’s the current competition:

As you can see, Stephen Appiah’s Wikipedia entry is right at the top. That his name is at the top is neither surprising nor interesting at all to me. What’s interesting to me though is that his personal website, www.stephenappiah.com does not appear on the first page at all.

Aside this Stephen Appiah anomaly, the rest of the page, and in fact, most of the first 100 results, is dominated by Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University (no relation to the soon-to-be Prof. George Kwabenah Appiah ).

This is the competition I’m putting myself against now. I don’t have any plans yet to win at this game, but I’m going to cook some ideas and share the progress over here.