Google Your Name - claimID

So a co-worker of mine, Kristi Dugan from Dugan Creative recommended I add a claimId to my pages to validate the web pages I say are mine are actually mine. I've go ahead and done that. Pretty neat idea, you have to include a script to your web pages and then tell claimID to validate that code. Their servers go to the site you claim is yours and looks for the code, if it finds the code, then they record the site as being validated and that it actually belongs to you.

A nifty idea, but it has it downfalls. The code has to be in the HEAD of your document, doesn't work in the body. That means it doesn't play nice with my Google Page Creator web site, I don't have access to the HEAD of my HTML pages using that tool (yet...come on Google open the Head).

It also means you can't claim your LinkedIn Profile. Too bad.

I'd like to see this technology expanded and other tools allow for you to add these types of scripts to your profiles.

Google Page Creator

Here's some of my thoughts and impressions regarding the Google Page Creator as a part of Google Apps.

It's annoying and time consuming to create a multi page design. Sure you can create a "template file" and duplicate that page to create all the rest of the pages, but anytime you want to change your navigation you must edit every page individually. I'm considering trying to use a server side include to see if that helps, that'll be in the coming days.

Second annoying thing, when you use the above description to create your site, the files are saved as home, home2, home3, etc. Not exactly what I'm looking for, and definitely not search engine optimized. So my site consists of home1 through home8 as the file names/urls.

Seems like it uses the site title as the page's title tag, which means your not able to maintain a site wide title. So in the upper-left corner of my site, I had to modify the site title to include the page title in order to save and link the pages correctly.

All in all, Google Page Creator was easy to use, but professional web people will realize the limitations quickly. As you can tell from my opening impressions, I'm already looking for ways to hack the pages to get a consistent navigation without having to edit every page. I'm also looking for a way to maintain a site title throughout and have readable context specific file/url names.

Google Analytics Working!

Here's my latest update, Google analytics is now working on both my web pages and on this blog. I guess I did screw up when I tried to first setup the script code on the Google Page Creator web page.

So to wrap this up, I pasted the script code provided by Google Analytics into the footer section of the page created by Google Page Creator.

I did pose the question about about weather I should use one or two accounts to track data on my blog and web pages to Ward Tongen, my SEO SEM budy. Guess we'll wait and see if he makes another comment here and answers my question. Well Ward??

Google Analytics with Google Page Creator and Blogger

So I got my tagging on my blog in and I'm collecting data now. It's a different story for the home page which was created using Google Page Creator. According to the directions on the analytics page, you have to include the script code before the closing body tag. Since I haven't found a way to edit anything other than the HTML in the selected elements using Page Creator, I decided to include the script in the footer for the page. So far I haven't had any tracking data come in. The analytics page says the tracking code is installed and that it's just waiting for data. Problem is, I've visited the site from home and from work and no tracking. Think I might try to re-paste the code in the page again. And check some help files.

EDIT: When I went back into Page Creator to look at the script I pasted yesterday, I couldn't find it. I'm guessing I must not have saved or posted it. Anyways, I pasted in the code again in the footer, so hopefully, it works this time. Keep you posted.