Baguio Insider

This is my therapy: site design. For some folks, it’s blogging their thoughts and feelings. For me, it’s figuring out how to fit all information into a page, how to rank higher in the search engines, adding content. For some folks, code is poetry, so they probably are in their 20’s. For someone like me, who was sent to typing class (figure out my age), code is a mystery just waiting to be solved.

Connie does not allow anyone to touch the food on the table until she has taken a photo, or makes her husband, Speedy, stop every 10 minutes on the way to Baguio to take photos of election posters and the Luzon countryside. I found myself doing the same thing in Dumaguete and my hosts, my cousin Tincho and his wife Lizza, would ask, “Can we eat now?” In Baguio, I am lucky to have the invaluable help of Nico Cawed who will brave the Panagbenga parades while I look after our guests at the Atenara House to take photos for the Baguio sites. Nico and I have been business partners in multiple endeavors in Baguio for the past 10 years, from vegetable dealerships to dog breeding to cafes and bars to websites. You will see a lot of his photos of Baguio in both Go Baguio! and Baguio Insider.

What I don’t really relish is editing photos, resizing them, “watermarking” them, organizing them. I guess I get impatient because there’s so much to write about. But there’s no escaping photos unless you want your site visitors to hit the back button post haste. Of course pictures are worth a thousand words to site visitors, but not for the web crawlers that will index your site. Plus, for the websites, I worry about text to design ratios that make a page load slower. Blogs perform better because they enjoy a better ratio.

I worry because, although Go Baguio! has consistently ranked 2nd or 3rd in Google Search (for keyword: “baguio”), it got bumped down to 12th or 13th in Yahoo! from 2nd place for the whole of March 2007. Of course anything other than the first page is unacceptable. You see, when I started Go Baguio!, I researched site design and site marketing at the same time. I figured it was useless to build a travel website that no one would find in the search engines. Many folks who have their sites designed by a professional should make sure than site marketing is given as much, if not more, weight as aesthetics.

Since discovering the opportunities open to internet publishers, I have been talking to all and sundry about blogging, sometimes giving mini seminars to get folks started on this medium. Blogging is simpler, more popular and cheaper than making websites with equal opportunities for monetization. I set up a simple tech blog called Chuvatech at Blogger. Although I prefer Wordpress, I believe it’s easier to start everyone off at Blogger.

Like my dogs, I must admit I have favorites. And Go Baguio! is my favorite site, because it’s the “eldest,” because it’s the one that I tweak constantly, because I am passionate about Baguio. I would say it is like Bono, my oldest American Cocker Spaniel, the one who sleeps with me. Buffy is Bono’s wife and although I love her very much, I must admit that I got her initially so that Bono could have a companion. Baguio Insider is my Buffy. It was created to complement Go Baguio! and does not stand alone.

Here you ask, where are the photos of Bono & Buffy? Wait for the pet blog . . .

Of course I could move all the information in Go Baguio! into static pages at Baguio Insider but there is more satisfaction for me in website design than blogging. This is why: with blogging, there’s a lot of design happening behind the scenes. Then, you click a button and voila the whole look changes. With a website, each page is designed separately. For some, a little too tedious. For me, heaven!

Blogging is a very sociable medium. In fact, it is a MUST to socialize! One has to go around blog hopping and making friends, hoping to get liked and linked. Although many folks who know me would argue otherwise, I consider myself a shy person. In the sense that I never feel comfortable entering another person’s territory, even when invited, but when you are in my turf, I will fall all over myself trying to entertain you. Somehow I feel that many bloggers are running a popularity contest and want to be loved. All I wanted was for folks to love the places and subjects I was writing about, and not me.

Originally, Go Baguio! behaved as a web portal, with a funky design and exciting colors. When it was redesigned last November to be a little more personal, I was flooded with emails by ex-Baguio residents wanting to know who it was who deigned to speak so authoritatively about their beloved Baguio. So I has to publish an About Page, and after three years, reveal my name. I suppose folks got tired of some lies spun on the web by those hiding under the cloak of anonymity so it’s necessary now for webmasters to gain the trust of their readership. In the extreme, there are now web personalities or celebrities, and folks marketing themselves and using their full names as domain names or site titles.

Now, the newest Go Baguio! design looks like a 3 column blog, except that the middle and right columns contain unique content per page. I had to expand laterally because I needed more space for information, otherwise the pages would be too long. So what am I doing blogging about design instead of updating all the Go Baguio! pages? Call it taking a break.