Making Websites

It has been a couple of months since I posted the start of the trial period for using Google Adwords. Google had offered a $75 voucher plus for signing up as a new user, the total charges for the period came to $85, so I needed to add another $10.

The earnings for the website www.katesperfumery.com are from Ebay $52.58 and Google $18.80 totaling $71.38 for that period

The page visits as per Google analytics are currently per month 366 page visits and 354 unique visitors up from 80 page visits and 126 page views.

Was it successful? Basing the return on the total cost of $85 then the outcome isn’t satisfactory. If you are intending to take up Google’s free $75 voucher as a way to kick start you website then it as been a success. The increase in visits to the website has been great, but quite possibly the visit would have increased organically with out the aid of Google Adwords.

One of my websites, www.katesperfumery.com has not been forthcoming in attracting visitors and in turn is not making any money. I have made some pretty feeble attempts to attract visitors over the last 18 months since owning the domain name. Recently though, I found a simple piece of software which has enabled me to start promoting sales via eBay.

I had notice an immediate  increase in traffic, mainly as I was showing an interest in the site and worked with the facilities of the software to enhance my visibility on Google, Bing and Yahoo.

I was a tad cautious using the eBay affiliate program, but after a couple of months I started to notice my traffic was increasing and was starting to receive some commission through into my account.

Just some quick stats for May 2011 for www.katesperfumery.com :

• Google analytics is showing, 80 page visits and 126 page views,
• eBay earnings 2.34,
• Adsense nil.

I have been receiving Google promotional codes in the mail, and thought that this would be an opportune time to use the $75 Australian free advertising to see the difference that it would make to the number of visitors to the site. I have set a budget of $100 and I am hoping to report by the end of the trial that my Adsense and eBay commissions far exceed the $100 investment.

Each month I will report on the number page views, eBay and Adsense earnings and the amount of views and clicks I get via Google Adwords.

Take a moment to make a donation to the American Red Cross which in turn will aid the victims of the New Zealand and Japanese earthquakes.

At the time of writing over 8,000 are confirmed dead and over 12,000 people are still missing.

Please help people that are in a less fortunate position, lots of small amounts do make a difference.

Thank you, Geoff.

Australian Red Cross

Global warming, climate change, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and social responsibility, these issues are important to me, and I am hoping that the readers of this article may feel the same.

My websites are hosted so they have a low carbon footprint and in the immediate future the carbon footprint will be reduced to zero as I have organised for the installation of solar panels on the premise where my server is located. I am fortunate because I am maintaining my own server and can make these relevant changes.

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However most of you will be relying on a third party to host your web site. So it will be up to the web hosting service to provide a carbon neutral environment for your website. There is a wave of companies that are becoming socially responsible and accepting responsibility for their carbon foot print.

Carbon neutral hosting companies will typically achieve this in one or more of the following ways;

1. The companies calculate the carbon used by their business and then purchase carbon offset certificates or plant trees that will neutralize their emissions.

2. The hosting service provider will use natural power from both wind and solar sources purchased through their energy providers.

3. Be totally self sufficient, which means that the hosting company will be generating their own electricity by means of solar or wind to power their operational needs.

Most carbon neutral web hosting companies that I have research for this article, also have active company policies that include recycling, reducing paper wastage, telecommuting for staff, using energy efficient plant and equipment.

Before you sign up to your next web hosting service provider, look in to their company policies and see if they have an active policy in reducing their carbon foot print.

Changes will happen as our expectations as consumers increase.

Google page rank, why I don’t strive for a higher page rank for my websites.

If being listed on Google’s first page is your goal then I would be focusing on other measures to increase you likelihood to make the coveted first page of Google.

In short Page Rank is attained by having quality incoming links to your website. The greater the number of incoming links from quality websites to your website, the higher the page rank. Does having a higher page rank mean that you will be listed above lower ranked pages in a Google search? No, for further reference www.smashingmagazine.com.

On October 15, 2009, Google employee Susan Moskwa confirmed that the company had removed PageRank from its Webmaster Tools section. Her post said in part, “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank )

As you know, getting a high page rank is not my main focus, then what do I focus on? I start by deciding what my main keywords are. The keywords I focus on is what I expect the visitors of my web site to type into Google to find my page.

Once the keywords are decided upon I then apply them to the Title tags of the page, include them in Header tags on the page, add them to the Meta Description tags and Meta Keywords tags between the Head tags of the page.

I also try to include the keywords as part of the content of the page. I have found that the keywords should be incorporated into the content in a natural way, do not add keywords for the sake of adding them. I guess there is a fine line between spam and good content.

I do also add relevant comments to other blogs, regardless of the “follow” status of the link. Visitors will come to your site based on the quality of your comments.

I have several pages on Google’s first page based on the relevant keyword searches, the highest page rank of all my web site is 2. Instead of focusing on the back links take the time to produce a content rich site.

This is the second post in the Making Websites for Free series. This post will describe how to register a free hosting solution so you can host your own website. The hosting solution as with the previous post will not have any of the host’s advertising to spoil the page. I found a free host at 125mb.com and subsequently opened an account.

The opening of the account was simple and straight forward. Go to the sign up menu and scroll down to the free hosting option and click, choose the FREE Hosting Plan, and click on continue.

The following page will ask you to enter your details by clicking on the “New Client” section, accept the companies policy and click continue.

Two emails will be sent to you, one giving full instructions on how to maintain your site and the other giving your login, password and login URL.

As a free hosting solution for your website I am impressed with its capabilities. In most situations the free plan is more than adequate to cater for not just beginners but seasoned website makers as myself. 125mb.com free hosting offers the user 150 MB of disk space, 4 GB of traffic, 1 Domain name, 2 Sub-domains, 1 Database, PHP, 2 email aliases and 2 emails.

So the above hosting plan equates to over 1,000 pages and 300,000 page views assuming that you have a mainly a text website. If you usage starts to exceed the above parameters, an upgrade for a small cost would fix the problem.

You are able to use a free sub domain that is provided by 125mb.com. I have chosen to use my own domain name, that has been pointed to 125mb.com. A domain name can be purchased at a domain register like www.GoDaddy.com for less than $US 15.00.

If you are toying with an idea for your next website, and want to set up a professional website for free, with the option of expanding if your site starts to expand then 125mb.com will be the hosting service for you.

Part 1- http://www.makingwebsitesblog.com/?p=231

My challenge in this post is to create 2 websites, both will be free and will contain no advertising from the website host to spoil your page. I will document all the relevant information and will create a simple website on all the sites involved.

I am going to split the free web sites in to two categories, one being a blog it will be included in this post. The other being a plain site that you can up load your web content to, I will provide that information in a second post.

The first category is easy as there are already free services for creating your own blog. Two come to mind immediately, they are blogger.com and wordpress.com, both are free and easy to set up. The only downside is that you can’t have your own domain name as part of the free package. So on Wordress.com your domain name will look like yoursitename.wordpress.com. Both Blogger and WordPress allow you to have your own domain name but do so at a small charge.

By going to www.wordpress.com and clicking on the sign up now button in the top right hand corner you will be asked to enter in your username, password and email address (your username and website name can be different). The following pages you will be asked to enter your blogs name and other details, all of which can be changed in the dashboard of your site at a later time. An email will be sent to you to verify that you are who you say you are.

The blog is now ready to go, once you are in WordPress dashboard you will have a pre entered Post, Page and comment, delete all of these and start afresh with your entries.

Take some time to explore the dashboard area, one of the areas I would look at is the appearance of your blog, you can change the layout by going to “Appearance – Themes”. If you change your theme no data is lost on your blog, and you can change back at any time. The Widgets under the Appearance header changes the information that is shown in the column section of your blog. Adding and removing items is done so by dragging and dropping, I don’t think they could have made it any easier.

While working with the WordPress blog I noticed that any advertising on your behalf wasn’t allowed, so if you wanted to use your website to promote and earn an income, then WordPress may not be for you. WordPress has an option where you can share revenue with them, but you will need to apply.

On the other hand if you are interested in advertising and monetizing your website then Blogger may be for you, as Blogger is owned by Google, you are able to advertise using Google Adsense.

Blogger has recently enabled Amazon as an advertising partner. Blogger like WordPress is easy to set up, if you already have an account with Google then it is a matter of simply going into your account and clicking on the Blogger link and following the prompts.

Part 2 – http://www.makingwebsitesblog.com/?p=238

Sunday morning and I am browsing the WordPress Dashboard, checking for upgrades and viewing the stats for this website while having the mandatory cup of coffee.

WordPress has a plug-in called Akismet, which comes as part of the standard install. This plug-in monitors the comments left and separates the spam from the bona-fide comments.

While savouring my second coffee I started to ponder which of the thousands of spammed comments could have been suitable for approval to this website. Having comments on your Blog improves the websites accountability. It shows that people are reading your blog, and helps provide a sense of community. The comments increase the content of your blog and also offers someone else’s opinion to your blog, which could either agree or disagree with your post.

Below is a sample of what is picked up by Akismet, does it sound credible to you, and would you allow it to be posted on your website?

“Just had to take the two seconds to post a thank you. Read through through your website and really liked the written content, bookmarked and I plan on coming back soon!”

For me, well it just doesn’t sound all that credible, and in my personal opinion I can not see it enhancing my websites accountability.

At the moment this site  is starving for meaningful comments, I am asking my readers, should I be less fussy and accept comments like the above or should I stay true and only accept on topic comments?

After you have composed and posted your blog entry, what next? Do you just leave and hope that people will browse to your website or do you promote your entry and let the greater community know, what has been written?

I use WordPress to manage my blog, a benefit of using WordPress is to be able to install plugins to automate required actions. Twitpost is a plugin that automatically updates my twitter account with the post’s link once it has been published. If you don’t have a WordPress site, you may need to make the twitter entry manually.

I also have a Digg account, where my I submit the details of every blog post, this only takes a couple of minutes as you place the url of your website and add details of the post and the category of the entry.

My favourite is to add my entry to Ezine Articles, the same information posted on their website will quite often rank higher and sooner on Google than your actual blog entry. The article at Ezine Articles will have a link back to your website, you will be able to track and measure your traffic flow from Ezine to your website. Another benefit of Ezine is that fellow bloggers and article writers can use your article as long as they acknowledge you as the author. You can see the visited links showing Ezine Articles above my actual blog post.

Facebook is a favourite for many, I use Facebook for my business, any posts that are relevant to my business are shared on Facebook.

Having RSS Feeds available on your website will allow previous visitors to recieve updates from your site. Your visitor will need to be signed to a feed service to receive the updates.

After every new post it will be automatically updated on Twitter. Posted by myself on Digg, Ezine Articles and if relevant added to Facebook. All subscribers to my RSS Feed will be notified with in 24 hours of the posting.

Please add your suggestions for what works for you.

A little while ago my old laptop needed replacing, it was over 3 years old and the battery had a 10 minute charge life, the charger was also needing to be replaced. A quick visit to ebay and for less than $500 Australian a new Toshiba laptop was delivered.

About the same time I visited a friend who had spent over $1,500 on a laptop from a large electrical retailer. My friend mainly uses the laptop to check emails and create simple word documents, I was thinking that maybe a $1,500 laptop was little extravagant for their needs.

As a web page designer and article writer I feel that my $500 laptop completes my tasks with ease.

Most visitors to my MakingWebsiteBlog are beginning their learning path, my blog covers information in regards to content, domain names, web hosting and SEO. I thought why shouldn’t computer hardware and software requirements be covered to, after all it is what is use to browse, compose and submit our work.

As you can see I don’t think bigger is better, the $500 laptop has Vista as the operating system, 2GB of ram, 160GB of Hard Drive and the CPU is a Celeron 2.2Ghz. The tasks that my laptop needs to undertake are, web browsing of course, simple picture editing (cropping, resizing and compressing for the web), text editing and when I just want to be slack, my favourite game.

Now you know what hardware I use for my web design, I will now run through the list of my essential software;

• Web browsers – IE8, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. So I can check that the page views ok across a variety of platforms.
• Gimp – For my picture editing.
• Dreamweaver MX 2004 – Mainly used in text editing mode, plus I like the site manager.
• Xampp – Xampp creates a server on my PC so I can create a full working page so it can be tested before I upload.
• Fireftp – A Firefox plugin to transfer files.
• And the last and most used software is windows notepad – I am using it now as I am writing this article. My Blog and EzineArticles have a feature where I can copy and paste text in to the “new post” form.

The above are my choices for hardware and software, some of you may like to use a desktop machine and would prefer to use a graphical interface to create your pages. I would like to know, and I assume that some the readers of my blog would be interested what you use. Please take time to comment, and share with us your hardware and software that you use to make your websites.