That Web Man

One of the main annoyances in the Internet age are spammers.

They’re still obviously hitting e-mail addresses aplenty and they moved on to spamming feedback forms from websites. As if anyone with even half a braincell would buy any shite that way!

The problem with blogs is with comment and trackback spam – usually dealt with by Akismet – and also with user registration spam. I’m not entirely sure what the point is with the latter unless it’s to get over comments requiring user registration first.

Anyway, I’ve just added two plugins to my main blogs:

1. reCaptcha for comments; and
2. Recapture for user registrations.

We’ll see how these fare.

One of the things that amuses me is receiving a telephone call from companies trying to get us to advertise with them, either in print or on a directory web site.

Print

We’re an Internet design company. If we want to find goods or services, we go to Google. If we want to buy a car or something, we try eBay and as a really last ditch effort might pick up a local freesheet. I suppose people buy the odd copy of Exchange & Mart from time to time, but I don’t.

I can’t remember the last time I used a phone directory either – especially in relation to goods or services – but my wife did recently, I must admit, when she was looking for a local gardener.

So why would I waste money advertising a company whose services are largely location-independent?

Especially when it’s not even peanuts we’re talking about: a full page ad. in one edition of Yellow Pages specific to one local area would cost me £4,900 + VAT!

Internet

That’s one area where again the web design company doesn’t pay to advertise – our site and those we do for our clients manage that all by themselves.

How much would a “Local Sponsored Listing” on yell.com cost? Between £900 and £3,150 for a year, it would appear. We charge our clients around £100 for global coverage for their entire website content, publicised free of charge on a monthly basis to the major search engines.

It beggars belief sometimes…

As I mentioned before, I have a YouTube Channel which features videos from my first adult web site and drives a lot of referrals to the main site.

I started it in February 2007 and it hit a number of milestones between Friday and this morning:

• More than 1,000,000 video views
• More than 100,000 channel views
• 1,000 subscribers

It’s just a pity that neither the video views nor the subscriptions generate direct revenues…

I’d received some copy text and some photographs from a friend who’s asked me to do his business a web site. He’s a hands-on guy and marketing brochures aren’t his forté so there wasn’t a great deal to work with.

So I sorted out some crops, re-sizes and thumbnails, decided to use WordPress just because, added a few tweaks like a “lightbox”, put together a formmail page (with a “thanks” redirect) and Bob’s your uncle: one classy web site in just a few hours.

I am involved with a local school on a personal basis. Yesterday, we were asked to come in for a training session to go through our own log-in for committee notes and our school e-mail which we can access via a webmail interface from our “desktops”.

I logged in, changed the default password, changed the theme of the desktop and then sent myself an e-mail as they use quite an involved address. I set up some notifications for the committees and asked the IT head if it would be possible to have my school e-mails forwarded to my own e-mail address. It wasn’t.

When I got in, I downloaded the e-mail and looked in great detail at the message headers, worked out which server was the most likely candidate and then set up my mail client to poll the school e-mail server to get my e-mails that way. Not hacking though, I hasten to add.

One of my long-term clients was kind enough to send me a cheque this week for two small invoices, so that it arrived within the payment terms … which is nice.

I didn’t get a chance to pay it in yesterday, so I was planning to nip out to the bank today. Fortunately Mrs Web Man spotted that the cheque hadn’t been signed … doh!

The client has now agreed to pay by BACS this time and hopefully they’ll continue doing so in future to save time and effort. We’ll see.

Well I added some more affiliate links as I mentioned earlier and one of them has already produced a $50 referral fee, so that’s paid for the domain name a few times over.

It’s probably still early days yet in terms of search engine positioning, but the site is already producing a number of clicks if not too many actual conversions.

So this evening, I registered two new domain names pointing at the same site: sexynylonwomen.com and women-in-nylon.com. I am hoping this will eventually drive more traffic that way and I am after all only re-investing some of the affiliate income into the site.

What I wanted to do was have both new domains mirror the existing site, but I have set my WordPress installation up to serve pages as the main domain name so they actually end up being effectively redirected. This is a pity as I really wanted the content to be available (and hence listed) as being from three sites – which is a tad naughty in terms of some search engine rules. Never mind though: at least it makes them ‘legal’ in terms of those guidelines.

The alternative was to set up two new WordPress installations and syndicate the main site to the two new sites, but this would have meant syndicating syndicated feeds which could then have its own repercussions. And of course it would mean two additional sites to update when there are new WordPress software releases.

Can I apologise to everyone else who uses WordPress: it’s my fault they’ve just released a security update – I was just thinking it had been two months since the last release and lo and behold a security release is … er … released.

In my case that means updating 14 web sites running WordPress. Eek!

Fortunately that only involved manually updating three sites (i.e. downloading the updated version, uploading it over the three installations and running the upgrade script).

The other 11 sites are all hosted at DreamHost* which boasts one-click installations and upgrades, so for these sites the upgrades required a theme back-up for each of the sites just in case and then clicking the upgrade link in the DreamHost web control panel, waiting a few minutes and then clicking the link in the confirmation e-mail. Once done, a quick upload of the customised themes and all done.

* Don’t forget to enter the promo code THATWEBMAN to get your $50 discount.

So that post about adult affiliate marketing and more particularly, the affiliate programs’ links and banners got me thinking: why not go for a full-on site featuring both affiliate advertising, free affilate-provided sample pages and even free content by way of RSS feeds?

And that’s exactly what I did, adding in some regular posts as well as some free YouTube content provided again by their tagged RSS feeds.

As usual, DreamHost got me set up in an evening and I put some banners in place and syndicated some RSS feeds. One of them, though, is refusing to release its formatting so I’ve had to ruin the design by giving the posts a white background so that the formatted black text can be read. Pain in the arse, but the support bods at Traffic Cash Gold are trying to help out now. Affilate links are coming from TCG as well as Adult Pay Master and the Lady Sonia franchise.

Anyhow, fill yer boots with pr0n at Glamorous Matures.

This site amused me a lot: Make My Logo Bigger Cream

Now this blog may be pretty ‘busy’, but I’m a big fan of white space and the “less is more” approach to design without being too heavy (or should that be ‘light’) on the minimalism.

I have two clients who were presented with clean and attractive web site designs that they slowly chipped away at demanding bigger, bolder fonts, in-your-face images and more “stuff” until they ended up with sites that frankly I’d rather I wasn’t featuring on my client portfolio.

Maybe they should buy some of these products