I work for the Professional Bull Riders, Inc. in the capacity of Web Developer (Visit the PBR Online. Recently we have been looking at making changes to the site, adding more content pages, restructuring the layout on some of the internal pages to be more modern looking and reviewing search engine optimization and marketing.

All of this is necessary for growth, sustained visitors, enhancements and general creating forward motion on any given web site, especially for one that is in the top tier of sports entertainment. The issue happens, as it has happened at countless other enterprises, the code base is getting older, has been touched by many programmers over the years and is nearing point of needing to be completely rewrote to be modernized. That happens. No question.

The discussion here is, does clean, well commented code help sustainability in an application, including a web application? Short answer is yes. Does valid HTML markup do the same? Again, the short answer is yes. If the code base that exists is written using proper and valid HTML/XHTML markup, and is commented properly or document properly to give other developers a decent idea of the logic behind any given subset of functions, routines and other logic to understand what was being done and why. It also helps for the same developer when he/she needs to go back and make changes on code that may have been written months, even years prior.

As we move forward at my place of employment, we are looking at various platforms, ideas and methodologies to create a platform that is extensible, pliable and can be built upon in the future. This platform, as it will become, will be something that can be built upon to create the best possible presence, as any enterprise should have a goal of accomplishing.

So does clean code and markup matter? Yes it does, and if your enterprise, business, or site is lacking in that area, shouldn’t it be about time to correct that situation?

For me, I found this out after viewing the Maps portion of my analytics and seeing that my home state had the most traffic. I do promote a bit locally, so I investigated further. At that point I realized that the majority of visits were from myself – adding posts, previewing them, checking the site, checking changes etc. So, what is one to do? I filtered my IP from the analytics.

Now I can do this because I have a static IP. Don’t have that? Ask your ISP, most for a small charge will set it up for you and for small monthly charge let you keep it. This way, the static IP can be filtered from your analytics results and not impact the bottom line on your view of traffic.

To accomplish this filtering process, once logged into Google Analytics click on the Analytics Settings. Next, under the Actions column in the row of the site you wish to add the filter to, click edit. At this point, you want to find the Filter section, and choose Add New Filter. This will give you something like the image below, where you can choose from several options to filter from. You can choose to filter domains, IP addresses and more. The one you want to select is Exclude All Traffic From an IP Address.

It is important to note how the IP address is notated: 192\.168\.0\.1 – notice the backslash before the period. You can exclude a single IP address by including all four octets or you can exclude and entire range by including fewer octets: 192\.168\.0\. note that it ends with the \. this will exclude all hosts on the 192.168.0. network. So if you have multiple users in your company that view your site repeatedly with multiple IPs from the same network, you can effectively exclude all visits from staff this way.

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In the past 1 1/2 to 2 years, we have seen another phenemona happen – the devaluation of PageRank. Apparently not just by web masters, web developers, SEOs and SEMs, but now by Google themselves. With the advent that they are trying to de-value paid links, links that can carry page rank to lend creed and credibility to a site, many top ranked sites are experiencing major PR drops. Sometimes up to 4 or 5 points.

According to Web Pro News, most of them took a 2-4 point drop, with www.statecounter.com taking the largest in their supplied list going from 10 to 6. I do believe their list may have came from over at Andy Beard’s site.

The completely amazing thing of all this, is the buzz it has created in the blogosphere (yes, people just like me {only with more power, clout, writing time and blogging experience} writing about it). People have came forward with conspiracy theories, ideas that Google is personalizing this round of updates against entities and much more craziness.

As I said in a comment over on ProBlogger – when will the Google PR craziness end? Ever? Probably not anytime soon. Can PR drop, the site still have quality content and get great traffic? I guess the next few weeks will tell on some of these sites, won’t it.

Personally? This site’s home page has a whoopin’ up PR of 3. One of my work sites has PR5 and the other a PR4. However, the PR5 page does significant sales volume and has a great visitor number, as well as garnering nearly 60% of our traffic from search engines. I get about 39% of the traffic to this site from the search engines.

To that end, we are going to start working on some tutorials to post on here, for your enjoyment, perusal and educational fulfillment, and sure, we will probably have some advertising start showing up to help monetize the time we spend on them, and help offset the costs of running a dedicated server, but isn’t that normal?

There are some categories we will be working on, which we will post as we get closer to those release dates of the tutorials, that will be good for discussion, to the point we may even setup a forum for the further discussion of them.  Some topics that are relatively new in the web design and marketing will be tutorialized and explained step-by-step to form a solid foundation to which one could build relatively easy from.

For now however, you must be patient and wait.