Posts Tagged ‘competition’
EU puts the brakes on Internet Explorer
Do you like Internet Explorer? Yes? No, wrong answer. You don’t like Internet Explorer. That’s the message we’re trying to push here in the EU 
I always have projects to work on, things to do, things to learn so i really shouldn’t be idle at any stage. That’s incredibly harsh on myself but i’m determined to up my work rate and heap on the pressure.
photo credit: SuperFantastic
Skydive Offer
Since i announced my skydive offer, i’ve completed 3 designs, i’m working on another and i’m also working on a website. So 5 jobs in total. No doubt there’ll be more to come 
wifimapper.com
wifimapper.com is pretty much ready – i’ve a few things to tidy up and it should be good to go tomorrow (Saturday). It will be a constant work in progress though – i’ll be adding wifi hotspots to it over time, around the world… not just in Ireland/UK. Still, it’s a nice site, decent idea and again it’s been built entirely by my own fingers
Other projects
Next week, i should be meeting up face to face with people and talking about BeerChief / working out a deal for that third partner. I’ve a bit of work to do on irishgolfer.ie and i also want to spend some time creating content for theleavingcert.com – that site is getting hammered with traffic at the minute.
It always does at this time of year but tehre’s no doubt about it – the number of students logging on to the net for advice and information is increasing year on year. I have the stats to prove it. Secondary level schools and government need to get serious about online education. But i suppose i shouldn’t be complaining – all the more traffic for me and theleavingcert.com 
Next week
Next week i hope to launch iwantideas.com too. That’s a new one for you guys – i’ve mentioned it before but never disclosed the domain name. It’s pligg based and unfortunately pligg have still yet to launch pligg 1.0. I can’t do much with the site until they do as most designers and theme developers won’t do anything until the full version is released… (i have release candidate 5 installed at the minute). I could downgrade to pligg 9.9 but i’d rather not. Instead, i’ll wait it out.
I’ll also have this skydive offer running next week and i’ll be expecting more work too.
So right now, i’m extremely busy but it’s all constructive work. I’m building a portfolio, i’m investing time in projects with potential and i’m constantly learning and sharpening my skills as i go along…
I could think of much worse things i could be spending my time on…
Last night, i spent about 2 hours domain hunting. I’d decided i was going to create a site which dipslayed the location of free wireless hotspots using google maps.
Charity Bypass gave me the idea due to the way in which it works – you’ll see that site live very soon by the way, the site is basically good to go now but i just want to create and build a few small social accounts for it which will help to launch it.
It won’t quite be a case of rinse, wash, repeat with this new wifi site, but i will be able to fast track the development of the site thanks to my work on charitybypass.com.
I struggled to find a domain though for this site. I had shortlisted names like freewifihotelmap.com but then i came to my senses and realized that’s much too long. 4 words? I’m better than that… so back to the drawing board and i told myself i could register more than two words in .com format (i toyed with .me’s and .net’s too).
In the end i came up with wifimapper.com. Short, sweet and kind of explains what the site is about. I realise ‘mapper’ is a weak word, but i have to go with my gut – i’ve sold sites with names like ‘sawurl’, urldwarf’, ‘imagehosti’ etc… so this isn’t at all bad.
It’s just about good enough to be understood by search engines and it’s also just about good enough to be understood by humans. But traffic won’t come from search engines initially – believe it or not people don’t actually search that much for things like ‘wifi hotspots’ or ‘hotels with free wifi’. But it’s a growth area, it’s something that can only become more popular, so i’m happy with the domain – i’m confident it’s the best unregistered domain i could find which best represents what the site is about.
My job will start immediately. I need to create a simple logo, i’ll probably use the same sort of style of theme as my charity bypass one, just re-worked slightly. I then have to start building up content and maps / locations which is the time consuming part.
But this is something that interests me, it’s something that will benefit people and i believe i can do a better job on this than most of the competiton. From a quick search i can see similar sites are ugly, not user friendly and a lot of good, strong domain names are just parked landing pages.
The geansai gorm SEO competition is finally over and i’ve bagged a very respectable 2nd spot. The site hit no.2 spot yesterday, much to my amazement as it had slid down the pecking order last week.
No change in things today which means i came second behind Paul Savage’s mybluejumper.com. I’m delighted with that performance. I was ‘taken out’ last week with cold/flu/fatigue and so didn’t do much on the site itself. Had i got that week back maybe i could have pushed for top spot.
Some interesting things to note are;
- bluejumpernews.com (my entry) was the only site in the top 10 results to be hosted on a non-irish host/server. It begs the question, had i been on an Irish server, could i have nipped in to get top spot? Reason being, google have said before that server location plays a role in SEO.
- bluejumpernews.com ranks no.1 for ‘geansai gorm’ in yahoo.com (there’s no equivalent of google.ie, only yahoo ‘pages from ireland’ which is like google ‘pages from ireland’).
- bluejumpernews.com has 11 pages indexed and 33 incoming links according to yahoo, 41 pages indexed, 1 incoming link according to google. The winner, mybluejumper.com has 1 page and 1 incoming link according to yahoo, 37 pages indexed, 42 incoming links according to google.
I’ve learned a great deal from this SEO competition and picked up a lot of tips. Although it’s nice to come second, i’m sort of disappointed i came that high purely because it shows i’m not that far off the pace when it comes to aggressive SEO’ing. Had i come 14th or 15th or something i would have been angry and eager to learn more.
But bluejumpernews.com WILL continue to grow and as i’ve said before, i won’t stop developing it until it becomes no.1 for the term geansai gorm – doesn’t matter how long it takes, it’ll be nailing that no.1 spot at some stage as that was the objective from the start.
So my first SEO competition ends in what i’d call success – 2nd place. Now i’ve set the bar for myself, next time anything less than 1st won’t be good enough
This week has been an awful week for me online. In what should have been the final push to top this geansai gorm competition, i was in bed at 10pm most nights and not at all motivated plus i’ve been snowed under with college work.
I noticed the site slip down to 5th or 6th in the pecking order and thought that was that – the others were now putting the boot down and breaking away.
Today however, Geansai Gorm News is back up in 3rd spot. With just 2 days remaining, it’s looking good for me. A podium finish perhaps I’ll be more than happy to finish in 3rd spot now under the circumstances.
Once this contest is finished, I’ll also be revealing the tactics i’ve used to get the site to where it is plus the tactics others have used to go one step further and beat me.
Wherever i finish, it won’t end here either – i’ll continue to work on the site until it ranks no.1.
