September 2008 Archives

30/09/08 - Win Fellows Hall

Kieron first brought this to my attention last week.

Given that the housing market is volatile and us first time buyers have very little chance of seeing the ladder let alone getting on the first step of the ladder, the idea of raffle off a house might seem crazy but seems to work!

A property in Devon (BBC Breakfast Video) seems to have proved the concept can work by raffling off 46,000 tickets at £25 a pop. This netted the owners £1.15 million less costs. The site was registered on 12th May 2008 and by September the tickets were sold out. The reason Brian and Wendy Wilshaw raffled it off was due to the lack of interest in their £1 million home in the current turbulent market. More

29/09/08 - Step 5) Adding Functionality

Okay, back to the tutorial. Before we go any further, take a look at my chocolate recipe website (told you it was a pants domain name!) and have a good nosey at it. It's built using the tutorials as a basis although I've glossed it up only very slightly.

For prosperity, here's a screenshot: More

26/09/08 - The Power Of Martin Lewis (Well, His Website Really)

He's everywhere - he's got an incredibly popular website, he's got some books and he's been on TV both on his own show and as a consultant.

I recently launched a site and decided to offer a prize draw for newsletter subscribers. Things were going horribly (with around 30 people subscribed) until the middle of September when a Money Saving Expert forum member stumbled across the site. More

23/09/08 - 5 Rules To Making Your Affiliate Marketing Campaign A Success

Over time you learn a thing or two and you get accustomed to the way the industry ticks. For example, I can now distinguish between an idea that will make me money and one that won't. That's a skill that takes time and is always being fine tuned by actual results.

I thought it might be handy to jot down a few simple "rules" for ensuring your affiliate marketing efforts are a success. More

22/09/08 - Thanks RedSave For My 7" Digital Photo Frame

Not sure if you've noticed but I love freebies! DHL just turned up to deliver a CiBox 7 Inch Digital Photo Frame care of RedSave. More

18/09/08 - Orlando Holiday Pictures

This is my last post about my Orlando Florida holiday and it's purpose is to show the transformation between information site and holiday snaps site!

Here's the old site: More

17/09/08 - A Look At Xenon Data Tools From Affiliate Future

Affiliate Future seems to be progressing quite nicely in developing a robust affiliate-centric website. Admittedly, their Beta site has a few loose ends (hence why it's still Beta) and there are a few affiliate customer care issues that crop up now and again on A4U, but it's safe to assume that AF are on the way up.

A few websites I'm working on tend to revolve around AF as they seem to have several niches they are very strong in. The upshot is that I'm promoting their merchants more than several other networks.

Xenon is their new data manipulation tool and is set to rock the affiliate world. Having been asked to take part in Beta trials, I thought I would share some of the concepts and the benefits for affiliates.

So here they are! More

11/09/08 - When On A Research Holiday, Take Some Photos

I did! I took some video clips too. The problem is, I was looking at the obvious things. I took the obligatory photos and videos of the hotel rooms and attractions. We went on an Orlando helicopter tour and took photos and video clips of this.

But I forgot one major thing - to take photos of the other bits and bobs. Things like shopping malls, restaurants, etc. 'm currently updating my Orlando site and now struggling to find pictures for the restaurants we visited.

So if you are reading Tania, get some pics of things that may seem dull at the time during your trip as they'll come in handy later on.

Anyhoo, here's some of the more wacky pictures we took whilst away. More

08/09/08 - Public Thanks To Sunshine

I would like to publicly thank Chris Clarkson and the rest of Sunshine for my familiarisation trip (aka holiday) to Orlando.

We had a great time and jammed as much as we possibly could do into our 7 night holiday. We met a wide range of people from those that couldn't do enough to those that we'd like to quickly forget ;-)

We had a couple of problems whilst away although these are probably experienced by a lot of travellers. More

08/09/08 - Apologies For The Downtime

I had set a few articles about my recipes site to appear whilst on my free holiday from Sunshine.

All was good and well until a rogue plugin kept crashing the server. The plugin had been running for a year so I can only presume it was the content of a post or the server had been updated. Nevertheless, the avoid any hassle, the site was taken down until the plugin could be safely removed (which it has now been). More

07/09/08 - Back From Orlando!

If all has gone to plan, you'll have not noticed I've been sunning myself in Orlando, Florida. I should have landed and returned back to wet Wales by now.

I'll probably be suffering from jet lag too so if you're waiting for a reply to an email, please wait a few more days before shouting at me :-) More

06/09/08 - Step 4) Getting The SEO Right

Let's talk SEO as it determines everything non-script related.

We've already discussed urls and have opted for a "url/recipe-id-title.html" structure. The benefit of this is that the keywords (presumably the recipe name) will feature in the URL. Some say it's not important. I prefer nice tidy urls over "url/recipe.php?recipe=1".

So what else do we need? More

05/09/08 - Step 3) Creating The Files - Part 3

So far we've got our template files laid out. We've got a sparse CSS file and we've got the basic pages required, empty but ready to roll.

The first thing to do is fill in the static files: terms, privacy, disclaimer, contact, about.....

You can do this following this file structure:

<?php
$pagetitle="Page title goes here";
$pagekeywords="list, keywords, here";
$pagedescription="Write a page description here";
include "includes/head.php";
echo "<h1>".$pagetitle."</p>";
echo "<p>Page text goes here</p>";
include "includes/foot.php";
?>
$pagetitle is used to define the H1 tag on the page along with the title tag in the head section on the html. $pagekeywords lends itself nicely to the keywords tag and thus the description tag also works in the same manor.

The only PHP files that should now be empty are index.php, recipe.php, category.php and rss.php. Before we fill them, let's sort out htaccess.txt and robots.txt. More

03/09/08 - Step 3) Creating The Files - Part 2

CSS is a wonderful thing, especially combined with templates. By changing the contents of one file, you can roll out changes site-wide (template files and CSS).

This site will make use a CSS template so at this stage, I'm going to set up a very basic style.css file.

The template page will be split into four areas: More

02/09/08 - Step 3) Creating The Files - Part 1

Step 3 will be split into 3 sub-steps. Firstly, I've going to take a look at the basic template system I'm going to use together with the basic pages required. Next I'll look at populating the stylesheet and starting work on a basic template. Finally, I'll look at the htaccess file and robots.txt file, together with the code on the crucial pages.

So, let's delve into the overall directory layout. More

01/09/08 - Magical Keywords Of August 2008

As a bit of a break, here's another look at the wacky keyword chart of August 2008.

Let's see what you've been searching for... More

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