Plans for this week

// May 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal Goals, australianwebmaster.com, diyweb.com.au, freecssgallery.com

I need to put some commitment in to getting some things done. This week I am planning to work on the following:

freecssgallery.com

I have left this site for quite some time, in fact the last template added was 7 March. I was expecting a whole lot more traffic to the site than what I am getting, having said that, the site traffic seems to be picking up but it’s still pretty pathetic.

I have a number of CSS template lists bookmarked so it’s just a matter of going through and picking out the ones I think look the best. As I’m using WordPress I can then schedule them to have a new template to appear once a day.

My plan is to do around 30 templates then I can then I forget about it for a month. After that I can the reassess what do with the site.

diyweb.com.au

Not something I do very often but I was looking at the Whirlpool forums over the weekend and noticed a couple of people asking questions about setting up a basic web site. They were getting some pretty unhelpful advice – like go and learn HTML. Valid advice but I don’t think people NEED to know HTML to build a basic web site.

A while back I had an idea for a web site which catered for this type of person, I registered the domain diyweb.com.au but other than setting up the default WordPress install I hadn’t got much further.

The idea is to teach people how to start their own web site on the cheap.

This week I would like to put a bit more thought in to this site. I could easily get carried away with building the site so I want to work out what I MUST have to do to get it up and running. I’m not 100% sure where the income would come from (it might be a community service project? ) so I want to control how much time I spend on it.

australianwebmaster.com

Planning on trying to hang back a bit on this one for this week and work on some other sites. Will probably do some posting today (as it always goes dead over the weekend) and then see if I can leave it until the weekend.

Other stuff

• I have to put together a web design brief for a web site – planning on holding a competition on DigitalPoint for a design. Mainly done however have to come up with some example sites showing the type of stuff I like.
• I have to re-post a development project on a freelance site after the person we had doing it failed to deliver.
• I also want to keep up the posts on here, jono.me. It’s a bit of a personal challenge to keep committed to this site like I’ve intended to several times. Over the past week you can probably see a mixture of posts from personal blogs (like this one) to more hints & tips – a little  unsure what I should be posting at this stage. Thinking that the “hints & tips” probably deserve a better location than here but at this stage, just posting something is my goal.

Australian Webmaster update

// May 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

I spend an awful amount of time on australianwebmaster.com because you have to check on a forum a few times a day to make some posts and to moderate posts. As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s one of those sites where I’ve put so much effort in to it I can’t just drop it.

It’s coming up to 12 months since I took over the site – boy time flies!

The traffic is building though. Each month the traffic grows which is really good. Last month there wasn’t such a big growth but the site had a 30% increase the month before which I thought was really good. Hopefully things aren’t starting to slow down!

A few months ago I sent an e-mail out to a section of the members, basically those who had posted but not returned to the site for a while. I asked what they wanted from the forum. Didn’t get a massive response however I did get some suggestions.

The main thing I am doing now is putting out a monthly newsletter – it give members a reminder about the site. I am just about to send out my third one so hopefully it will get things humming along again.

The other thing is holding a live chat on the site for members to get together. The first one went really well, however the second didn’t. The first one was held on a Thursday night however I decided to run the second one on a Sunday night – I think that was my mistake. I have since gone to the community to ask their preference, which seems to be mid-week oo the next one will be held on a Wednesday. Hopefully a lot more people come this time!

Some other suggestions included highlighting more posts on the forum home page, just not the last post in each section. I was able to put a vBulletin add-on to do this.

Someone mentioned converting the site to a blog, which I thought would be a waste.

Still unsure what the future holds for australianwebmaster.com, it takes up a lot of time which I would like to be spending on other projects…

2009 Progress – Q1

// April 6th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

A quarter of the year has gone so I thought I would do a quick review.

I was just re-reading my 2009 goals and can pretty much say I’ve failed all round.

My goals were to:

1. do frequent posting on here – improved but not what I’d call frequent!
2. developing outside webmaster niche – failed again, I started another template site!
3. develop content/service sites – haven’t done

So what have I done?

My focus has been on australianwebmaster.com. It’s one of those sites that need a lot of attention and since I’ve put so much effort in to it you have to keep pushing so it’s not all a waste. It’s not going too badly, I will post an update shortly.

I also find myself burn out with external pressures (e.g. my full-time job) and I need to take a break from my web sites. It does effect my goals significantly however my first priority has to be my full-time job as that’s what pays the bills.

I’m still confident that forcing myself to update this blog is the best way to keep myself on track.

The other option is to set myself a goal of spending x number of hours a week on my sites however I don’t think it would work – my full-time job controls everything else and I still need to spend time with my wife and kids, etc.

Thank God for stats!

// March 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

If I ever need motivation for a site, looking at the stats helps to remind me that the effort is worth it.

Fortunately all my active sites come up with a nice green number in the % change column of Google Analytics.

I often get down about australianwebmaster.com however I was just looking through the stats and February was a record month for the site. The vBulletin stats also showed a record number of new posts for the month!

I’m one happy webmaster today.

Free CSS Gallery

// February 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // freecssgallery.com

I’m doing it again, this time with a Free CSS Gallery!

After what I considered a fairly successful experience with my free blog templates site, I’ve started up another one.

I was browsing my Web Sites For Sale e-mail from Webmarketalert.com where I saw a template site for sale. They included their traffic stats and they were receiving some decent traffic through the search term free CSS gallery. To cut a long story short, I have now set up a new site called freecssgallery.com which should obviously rank very nicely when people search for free CSS gallery.

Still needs some cleaning up (eg. needs a header graphic) but it’s basically up and running.

In fact on Friday it was ranking in position 11 (top of the 2nd page) and now today it’s ranking position 8 on google.com so my suspicions on ranking seem pretty good.

Unfortunately I am yet to see any significant traffic so I could have totally misread the search volumes but we shall wait and see…

freeblogtemplates.net now

// January 21st, 2009 // No Comments » // freeblogtemplates.net

Even though I sold the freeblogtemplates.net site a while back I am still keeping an eye on it to see how the site is progressing – and since the new owner hasn’t got around to removing my Google Analytics code so I can still see what traffic it’s getting.

The new owner has done something I wasn’t willing to do, which was stop posting to the site altogether. Not a single post has been added since I sold it.

You always hear people say search engines like frequently updated blogs so I was keen to see what the effect was.

Traffic wise it’s dropped by more than 50% since the new owner took over the site and stopped posting.

SERP wise, for the term “free blog templates” it’s #9 in google.com and #147 in yahoo.com. Previous SERPs had it at #7 in google.com and #1 in yahoo.com. So a massive drop at Yahoo but not so much as Google. PR has remained unchanged.

The drop in SERP at Yahoo has meant that instead of getting 1,400 visits from Yahoo the site now only gets 209. Despite only dropping 2 positions Google from my targetted keywords, traffic from Google has also dropped from 2,410 to 1,445.

Adsense earnings which were never great have remained the same, however the WordPress plug-in I used for displaying ads is playing up. It had a function allowing you to “donate” a percentage of your impressions to the plug-in author. It was set to 1-3% but it appears to be taking one of the two ad spots most of the time – meaning Adsense wont be getting seen as often as it should.

Nothing conclusive however still very interesting to see the effects of not updating the site.

Doing Business online = Getting ripped off

// January 13th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

How frustrating is it doing business online?!

Although it was a couple of months ago now I had a really bad experience getting some work done for australianwebmaster.com.

The design of australianwebmaster.com is looking a tad old and I struggled finding an existing vBulletin template which fitted the site. Webmaster forums are common and I really wanted australianwebmaster.com to stand out – if I used a generic template then that wouldn’t happen.

Anyway, I set about finding someone do design and code for vBulletin.

To cut a long story short, I finally found someone who had an impressive portfolio, mentioned vBulletin and was very reasonably priced.

After a few e-mails back in forth I was impressed by the professionalism of designer and he was quite accommodating to my ideas. His portfolio didn’t contain designs in the same style I wanted however they were quite good so I decided to give him a go anyway and hoped he could adapt to the style I was after.

We agreed on a payment plan which was 3 payments. One to start, an other one once the design was complete and then a final one on completion. I thought it was a good compromise and if he couldn’t come up with a design I liked I wouldn’t be too bad off.

So I made the first payment and within a week or so I got a design back – it was a basic mock up (which was supplied as a watermarked JPEG). Although it wasn’t quite what I was after it did grow on me and decided to proceed.

I sent the second payment so he could proceed with the coding of the template – on the condition that we may tweak the design a little as he hadn’t mocked up all screens as such.

Once I made the second payment the designer disappeared completely!

I tried numerous e-mails and he never responded. I also noticed that on the forum I found him on he hadn’t logged on for a while either so it wasn’t obvious that he was ignoring me but was still very unprofessional not to communicate with me at all.

I decided to put a PayPal claim hoping that he had simply lost internet access or something and I might be able to get my money back. As part of the PayPal claim process I had to wait for them to attempt to get a response from the designer – which they never did. In the end PayPal awarded in my favour and refunded a massive 41 cents! At this point I was really shattered.

I decided to publish some negative feedback on him where ever I had the chance. I even found my design in his online portfolio(!), so I put a comment on there too.

Finally he e-mailed me the PSD and basically said that he couldn’t code the template, apologised and I haven’t heard from him again.

The total of the 2 third-payments was more than his quoted “design only” price so I still lost money but at least I have something from the exercise rather than a useless watermarked JPEG.

I did ask for a refund of at least the difference but haven’t heard any more from him – which didn’t surprise me. My PayPal claim remains open so they should recover any future funds from him – it’s doubtful but maybe I will get lucky someday down the track.

The whole experience was a really big lesson for me but it was also very disappointing that I was ripped off. In hindsight I should have known better. I now see that there were warning signs but I guess I chose to ignore them as I was desperate for a good vBulletin designer who didn’t charge over the top.

The drama in getting a template still continues though, but will save that story for another day.

Going, going, gone

// November 13th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // freeblogtemplates.net

A couple of weeks ago I decided to see what interest there would be for my freeblogtemplates.net site.

To cut a long story short, it was sold – for $150. I am pretty happy with the amount I got for it considering it’s revenue was minimal, however considering the time I had spent on it it was probably not great!

In the end it was a learning exercise which only cost me $7 for a domain name – so making more than 20 times the amount I invested is pretty good!

It was a bit of fun to develop and it was good to offload it for some money rather than have it dwindle away and be worth nothing.

I now have to decide what project is next…

Please come again

// October 13th, 2008 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

AustralianWebmaster.com is still slowly building. A comparison between August and September (ie. the previous 2 full months) shows there was a 20% increase in unique visitors and a 45% increase in page views so it all sounds good statistically.

Activity wise it doesn’t appear to be building though. It appears that new members are enthusiastic in the beginning but then disappear. I’m guessing that the forums don’t have the volume of posts to come back daily, and without coming back every day people forget(?). Something I’m going to have to address… somehow…

In the last two weeks the activity has defintely dropped off so it will be interesting to see how the rest of the month builds.

Rising through the SERPS

// October 8th, 2008 // No Comments » // freeblogtemplates.net

In my last post I said that www.freeblogtemplates.net was position 3 on Yahoo.com and mid-way through the 2nd page on Google.com for the term “free blog templates“.

For the past few weeks I’ve sat at # 1 on Yahoo which is great, however Google is really the one I want to crack.

As of today I am position # 7 on Google and it is gradually climbing. I was at number 11 for a while (ie. top of page 2) and then I moved to number 10 and now it’s number 7.

This is without any targeted link building either – this just appears to be natural. The site does get links through link backs and people deciding to link to it, but I haven’t done any promotion of the site besides one or two links on other sites I own.

The site managed to get a PR2 in it’s first update too.

So far this month, 91% of the traffic is coming from search engines (53% Google, 32% Yahoo), 6% from referring sites and 3% direct.

So my little experiment in to SERP continues.

Since my last post I have also added Blogger templates but finding good quality templates for Blogger is a little more difficult than WordPress. The Blogger page is pretty well visited so I think my assumption that people using the term “blog template” could be looking for Blogger rather than WordPress was probably right.

I have also started putting ads on the site. I initially started with Adsense but I have now added some additional affiliate ads – targetting bloggers. I’m also using a “stripe ad” which runs across the top the page. Am getting some adsense clicks, but no affiliate sales yet.

Will try to update a little more often on this site as it will be interesting to have a full history of it’s progress.