Archive for December, 2006

I’ve switched from link units to ad units on JPEGr.

First of all, it should increase revenue. By how much? Probably not much.

It definitely looks worse imo.. it’s not as blended. But then again, i asked myself do i want a site that looks good and earns nothing? My aim is to make money from it. So i thought i’d experiment and see how it goes…

I’ll let you guys know how it goes. I’ll let it sit for about a week and see what happens. Fingers crossed it will perform without user’s being distracted by them. I don’t want to be bracketed as an adsense whore with ads all over the place… the single banner ad blends fairly well but should bring a higher CTR which at the end of the day is what i want.

i’ve drawn up a list of things i hope to implement on theleavingcert.com

• new logo (glossy, polished)? …. school/college theme if possible.
• new site layout/style with integrated space for adsense (web 2.0 look)
• Black shiney background, very light orange foreground. Page should be between 50%-70%
• Main foreground page surrounded by dark orange shiney border.
• Member section where members have access to everything.

There will be 5 main menu buttons, centrally located underneath the header… ‘Home’, ‘Subjects’, ‘Forum’, ‘Tips’ and ‘Links’.

‘Subjects’ will take you to a page full of thumbnail boxed images and headings. Members will be allowed rate subjects and add comments. When you click on a subject, you will be taken to it’s rating and comments along with notes for that subject.

‘Tips’ will take you to a database of member submitted tips which can include pictures as well as text… a random tip will appear in a box at the top of the page. Members can rate the tip 1-10. Users can then search for ‘highest rated tips’ and ‘most viewed tip’.

New Notes Section…
A section for people to upload word/excel/text files into a sorted database. e.g. if i have biology notes, i want to upload them into the ‘biology’ section. All uploads should include a description of the notes and the author.

Integrated Forum design…
atm, i just have a general smf theme i picked up, ideally, i’d want it to blend into the site design.

my main rivals are skoool.ie and ratemyteachers.ie, i want the site to eclipse those two in terms of looks. Also, i want the site to be simple and quick. No flash, no drop down menus etc..
i can’t put a time of this, and i can’t guarantee it will all be done but they are my plans and i’m going to start looking for designers soon…

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=roy+keane&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
there it is folks…. first page on google.co.uk for ‘Roy Keane’ today, at about 8.50pm.

strangely, .com & .ie have remained on 2nd page. But as most of my traffic will come from the UK, it’s the most important imo. Incredible results as just yesterday, i posted about how the site got indexed in 12th spot. For keywords that get over 8000 searches a month (over 250 a day), it’s a big coup.

Already traffic has increased. Fingers crossed Keane remains controversial and hot-headed

Good news today, noticed a bit of traffic on roykeane.net, then checked the site stats…

the site has been listed in Google, straight in a number 12, high up on the 2nd page for the terms ‘Roy Keane’. ‘Roy Keane’ was searched for over 2000 times last month according to overture (yahoo). So you could say it was safely searched for about 8000 across all search engines.

The top two pages in Google are every webmasters aim for their main keywords. It’s generally accepted that users won’t search past the first couple of pages unless they really need specific information. So this is good news for me, without any backlinks or promotion, it’s shot straight in at number 12. It means with directory submission, link exchanges with similar sites etc… i should make the first page for ‘Roy Keane’ very soon.

although it’s largely an automated site, i find myself checking on it daily just for news as i’m a Roy Keane fan. Hopefully other people will do the same and if it shows enough promise, i might make it into a full, professional site.

Well Christmas is now over and it’s back to work tomorrow for me

It seems like Christmas was ‘just another day’ on the internet… my traffic for all sites didn’t change at all. In fact, JPEGr seen a small increase in hits.

So what did i get? A 30gb video IPOD, shoes & jumpers (all from the other half), and a trip to Barcelona from the parents (other half coming too!). Not a bad Christmas!