We had to rewrite our entire web site (750 pages of content not including the forums) to keep up with the times!  Be sure if you visit it and have been there before that you refresh your browser a lot so it loads in the new pages!  Writing a new site certainly wasn’t by choice, but because search engines and frames are like oil and water now and we weren’t getting indexed properly anymore.

This was a hard pill to swallow since we’ve used frames for the last 10 years.  I should add “used frames correctly” and one of the scares few who ever did!   In fact about this time last year in our effort to fight back, we installed a java script on each and every page to auto-load the frame set regardless of what page a user might come in on.  It worked perfectly, except that it caused total havoc with the search engine spiders to a result that went as follows.  All 150 megs of quality content was reduced to 5 words, and all 750 pages had the same bogus title.  I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t discover this until recently when trying to find Decware on a simple key word search using something like “tube amps”.  We were no where to be found…. gone.  Of course if you already knew about Decware and typed in that name, you would get some 40 to 60,000 matches which is apparently all I ever did for the past year so I never noticed what was happening!

Anyway we’ve enjoyed top search engine rankings since the site was first written in 1996 all the way up to 2005 without ever spending one cent on advertising because of the abundant content of the site.  I almost flipped out when I realized I basically erased myself last year all the while thinking I was doing preventative maintenance!  So a new site has been written that no longer uses frames and is now for the most part debugged.  Decware should beging to show up with audio related keyword searches again soon.

-Steve Deckert,  webmaster with the now more than stiff neck!