Craft Fair Project

The placement of QR codes on Facebook pages seems to have mixed results.

The Craft Fair page is based on the House Design template - new_friends.html. Work on this template is part of the experiment.

I added the Google Tracking code to both the new_friends and the craft_fair_2022.html pages (as it was ommited before). The pages are being picked up by Analytics and I submitted the craft fair page to Google via GSC.

At the time of writing this the page had not shown up in a search. This could be due to the lack of content or that Google had determined that it was not important enough. I will have to add content and re-submit.

The process of submission seems to be still working as I have submitted the Village News page for October 2022 and that can be found.

The reason that the craft fair page could also be due to the fact that I had an outbound link (to a Facebook page) that was not constrained by a rel="nofollow".

Neither of these will be found unless they are referrenced on Facebook or distributed as a QR code on a flyer or poster.

Update:

I have created a main page for the Craft Fair and have a number of "Vendor" pages. So far these have yet to be found (visited)

I am not sure that the concept of a QR code is understood. One of the vendors has said that she has posted the poster to Facebook. There is a fundamental problem with scanning a QR code when it is being displayed on a mobile device. The posters themselves have yet to be distributed and I think that it is a lot to ask to expect people that maybe interested in coming to the fair to view it on a computer or tablet.

Page Naming

Pages that describe the vendors/contributors will be named "craft_fair_2022_XX.html". This is so that the files/pages can be archived and not used as "free webspace". In a similar manner to Google not approving of "Gateway Pages", and links to Facebook profiles can be seen as such, they will not be placed on the pages.

When the craft fair is over the pages will be archived and removal requests made using GSC. Should any of the contributors to the fair require web space they should pay for it.

Title tags should also reflect the content of the page so that GA4 can report them clearly.

SEO

This project is mainly another experiment in SEO. Depending on the content that I am given and the engagement of those involved an assessment will have to be made.

Obesrvations have already been seen in the Google doesn't seem to index "Gateway Pages". I did submit the URL to GSC and it reports as being on Google, however I can't find it making a search. True, there is little content but the H1 text is not currently found.

Update: Page can now be found - I made some changes, removing the outbound link and adding a bit more content.
The page can be now found searching for the "village name and Craft Fair 2022".

The reason that the search was not found as quick as I expected may have been due to a restriction that Google had placed on the page due to gateway issues or possibly because of the time taken for the SERP to propagate over the Internet.

The use of PDFs

As I was looking at this issue this is a reminder here. If I link a PDF from a page I have no way of tracking it apart from an event being registered in GA4. I have tried in the past to track this event but it only resulted in "hack" of the PHP code that I was attempting to use.

The Craft Fair Template

I really don't want to spend too much time on this.

At the moment the tow-column grid does not have padding when viewed on a mobile device. The Parish Council website does, but that uses w3-cards. See link below to w3c_template1.html

Update: 5 weeks before Fair

The template and the sub-pages are not looking too bad.

I have a list of vendors/exhibitors for the fair and quite frankly the participants are missing a trick if they don't send content for addition on the webpage.

11 November

Starting to think this is waste of time!

Results of campagne

Numbers for unique users (can substract 1 from Google searches and QR Code scans - it was me!). 1 Nov to 26 Nov.

• Oragnic searches - 13 (all "organic" searches, Google, Bing etc.)
• Those Scanning the QR code - 16 (both the physical poster and Facebook image of poster)
• Visits from mobile devices from link on Facebook - 11 (tempusfugit.me.uk)
• Visits from Facebook from a Computer - 4 (links as above)

Total number of views is higher but unique users is the revelant metric. Visits from vendors is also captured and may have been useful if the numbers above were higher.

Organic results not specifically nroken down to mobile and other but real-time observations confirm that the majority were mobile.