I don’t know if I’m getting better at making websites, but certainly my philosophy has evolved. For buried mirror I’ve gone with a very spare look. I’m no longer putting in social bookmark and rss links like most of the seos use, for example. The only social bookmarking sites that seem to get used much (for my pages) are delicious and stumbleupon, and I figure most people know how to tag a page to those sites without being prompted.
I’m using an image map for navigation. Is that a good idea? I’m trying to keep the navigation to eight items (counting “home” and “contact”), and the nav words are too general to be of any use for search engines anyway. Since the image repeats on all (most? I made a sidebar style page in case the nav image is incompatible with body images) pages, it doesn’t slow the pages down once it’s cached (it’s about 35K, which doesn’t seem too bad).
On my computer the buried mirror pages are loading really fast, and I’m pleased with how this is progressing. Still some page moving to do (some pages are still referring to right reading), and I will need to strengthen the content …
“The Hand of Time” seems a good way to start.
Maybe what I’ll do is every fortnight or so make a link roundup of the main new additions to the satellite sites. That is, if I have the energy to keep juggling these sites without dropping a ball.