Miller Archive: Site History - 1

The Miller sites evolved under pressure, rather then being designed from the ground up. On Friday the thirteenth of August, 2004 I was having a chat with JB (JB prefers to remain anonymous) in his apartment in Old Sandwich, Windsor, Ontario. I offered to put some text files he was working with into a database. A few weeks later this had developed into a full scale Internet play (details of which are still confidential).

By early October I had some free web sites up and was relearning HTML, and pondering CSS, frames, and. tables. Because I had been out of Website design for a few years, a smaller project as a practise-run seemed desirable. One thing I didn't want to do was to write loads of content, so I decided to redesign this, my home site, adding graphics and all the latest bells and whistles, then put it up on one of the free sites. This I did, but it wasn't very exciting or challenging.

However, one day JB mentioned a book: The Every Day of Life by J.R. Miller, which he had typed-up, purely for his own benefit. I offered to put it on the Web so that other people could share. This was supposed to provide additional content to a larger Website, which would be going up later. However I did a Google search and came up with some more of Miller's works including In Green Pastures, Girls: Faults and Ideals and By the Still Waters and decided that there was enough content for a sperate site, and that a site dedicated to miller's works would be more appropriate.

The first free miller site jr-miller.faithweb.com opened on the 13th of August and by the 27th we were paying $2.99UDS a month for www.jr-miller.com. All the files from jr-miller.faithweb.com were transferred over to the new site and I started asking for links from various Christian directories.

Unexpectedly, the site was growing rapidly. I bought Morning Thoughts from the local second-hand book store and Come Ye Apart came by inter-library loan. JB stared typing up both books while I kept finding more of Miller's works on the Web. On November 7th I uncovered the text to Sorrow in Christian Homes then a few days later Come Ye Apart just as JB had started to type it up.

There is no point in of creating a web site if there is no traffic. Traffic comes from:

Lots good content so people want to both come back, and tell their friends. We are certainly creating lots of good content; perhaps too much, and too rapidly.
Lots of incoming links from high profile sites. I am working on this, adding a link a day. This doesn't sound much but it can be time consuming, Adding too many links at once can be very confusing as it is difficult keeping track of what you have done. All the names of the directories seem the same. The terms Christ, Christian, link, or directory seem to occur at least once in every web site I'm linking from.
A high ranking in the search engines so that people using tools such a Google will find JR Miller DD or his books easily.

Googling for "In Green Pastures"

Searching for a term such as JR Miller DD and www.jr-miller.com will be in the first 5 results returned. Searching for "In Green Pastures" and Miller only place the Miller site in fifth place.

Hits on the Hod Carrier

As an example of obtaining better results in searches I am trying to promote the term hod and hod-carrier. My first job was carrying the hod, and I am endeavouring to foster the job-hod-carrier page by adding more links to it. For a more complete overview of how to cultivate hods and their carriers go to hod carrier