Does your site suck? Yeah, I know. Most Ghanaian sites are terrible, to say the least. Sometimes I wonder whether the webmasters who spew out such websites were given special orders to make the website as painful to use.

I appreciate the fact that there are just too many variables at play when it comes to web sites, that it’s practically impossible to build that perfect website that suits every single visitor or user agent out there.

But your business website is supposed to help you do more business. And if you cannot directly account for any return on your investment, then it’s total waste of time, in my humble opinion. Certain things are just inexcusable. Broken links, annoying flash intros that take ages to load, huge images, broken search boxes, broken contact forms, copy that makes you want to scream … the list goes on and on.

That’s why I’m introducing Fix My Site, a new addition to GeorgeAppiah.com. Once a week, I’ll pick one Ghanaian website, rip it apart, and present a thorough professional review, from the point of view of organic search marketing.

These reviews are not meant to ridicule anyone (even though I’m probably going to laugh my head off as I browse through some sites). I’m simply trying to bring web developers, designers and small business owners together to produce websites that get results.

But as they say, charity begins at home. So I’ve been working hard to ensure I’m not guilty of the things I’m going to talk about. So far, I’ve managed to achieve valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and valid CSS. And more features and functionalities are coming.

So if you’re not happy with the performance of your website, fret not. Professional advice is coming. And you don’t have to pay a dime for this advice. Just shoot me an email, and I’ll take a look at your site and provide you with some real suggestions. And by real, I mean real.

If you happen to belong to the rare breed of Ghanaian webmasters and website owners who care about web analytics, you will find Google Trends a handy tool for analyzing how often your website’s main theme (or any topic, for that matter) is searched for over time.

I stumbled upon this cool tool today as I was going through Google Zeigteist, which, I also learnt, has been replaced with Hot Trends

You can enter up to five topics and Google Trends will analyze a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.

These results are displayed in two simple graphs. The search volume graph at the top shows the number of times the keyword was searched for. The second, just beneath the search-volume graph, is the news-reference-volume graph. This shows the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories.

In addition to the search and news volume graphs, Google Trends also displays the top cities, regions, and languages for the first term you entered.

To see Google Trends in action for myself, I pitched Ghana against Uganda, sort of Using SBI’s Brainstormer, I knew in advance that there are a lot more searches containing the term “Ghana” than “Uganda”. And Google Trends confirmed this in the graph below for the year 2006.

Google Trends also shows a spike in the search volume for Ghana in July. This can be attributed to Ghana’s impressive performance in the Soccer World Cup event held in Germany which took place around this time. Indeed, the top article during this spike is about Ghana’s 2-1 win over the United States of America.