Keeping your Site Fresh

The addition of a new section, the Celtnet Affiliate Information section to the Celtnet has allowed, for the first time in ages, me to think about the site's design and how it works. I've been working on the site for several years now and the site's basically grown organically as I've added more content and more sections. Each one has had a slightly different design and a slightly different look and feel, mostly due to how my skills have grown over the years. This does mean, however, that much of the site is completely inconsistent.

Some pages are very simple, others are incredibly complex and I'm definitely not driving either traffic of clicks to large areas of the site. Basically I had lots of site real-estate that was woefully under-used. In addition I was building large databases of potentially useful content, but those databases were, at best, driving only a single page or region of my site. It was time for a complete re-think. OK, so I couldn't re-vamp the entire site over night and there was lots and lots to do.

But, if I was clever then I could kill two birds with one stone. I could continue adding the good content I needed whilst, at the same time, working on a new site design and layout. I wanted the pages to be more visually appealing, to have more places for ads at the side-bearigs and to have far more opportunity for adding dynamic content.

I came across a very nice CSS-based pattern for this a couple of weeks ago and this has now been re-coded to suit my needs and released as the basis for the Celtnet Affiliate Information. One of the worst pages in my whole site was the Celtnet Recipes home page. As this was the official portal to one of the largest and most popular areas on the entire site this was basically criminal!

As you can see, the page has now been entirely re-done (compare with the West African Recipes page for a feel of how it looked (actually it wasn't even as good as this). Now I have nice navigation tabs at the top, a navigation menu on the left and content that refreshes itself in the main windows. I can even add extra adverts to the side-bearings without drastically affecting the content. I think it's much better and this version of the web page will soon be rolled-out across the entire site.

What I also like is that the general 'look and feel' can remain consistent across the entire site but substituting a single logo (which belongs to a global site-wide family of logos) can instantly tell the visitor where on the site they are. The various regions of the site can be better linked internally, maintaining more of a discreet feel so that someone interested in mobile phones, say, can just navigate within the mobile phone region of the site. Someone visiting the recipes section only needs to look at the recipes section of the site etc yet all these distinct site regions can be tied back to the site's overall home page and master index.

This way I can keep Celtnet's Celtic region, the Recipes region and the Information region (with its medicine, information, programming, internet marketing and mobile phone sub-regions) separate but entirely linked. For the first time it will be possible to integrate the site possibly and to drive better advertising across the entire site.

This is a major change, but it shows that you should really design your site before comitting to the coding first! But I'm a programmer and an information provider rather than a designer. Ah well...

I'm also hoping that the resultant better integration within the site will increase my exposure to the search engines and my exposure to my site's visitors. I'll keep any results (both positive and negative) in this blog.

You can learn more about these changes and how they relate to SEO, web design, and keeping your visitors interested in your site on my eZine Celtnet WebInfo eZine

Trying to Make Money

As I've had little enough response to my Help Stefan Campaign I'm having to consider alternate means of getting more money.

The condition of her father in Liberia has deteriorated considerably and next week Stefan is talking of taking the bus from Dakar to Guinea, from there she will change to Freetown in Sierra Leone and from there she has to work-out a way of getting to Liberia. If only I could afford the airfare, then things would be so much easier.

I've tried putting-up pages for eBooks including:

Celtent Guide to Spices and Spice recipes

Pictorial Guide to Building and Upgrading your PC

'Memories of Myth and Man' Poetry eBook

Each of which goes to helping the Help Stefan Campaign. I also have the One Dollar SEO links where webmasters can purchase non-reciprocal links for $1 which are guaranteed to be valid and remain live for the life of the website and which will never exceed 100 links in length so that all links on a given page will be indexed. Again, take-up is extremely slow with only a few links having been taken-up thus far.


So, this weekend, in desperation I'm trying every trick I can to make some money for this campaign. The latest approach is to try the 'Hubpages' site both to generate additional income and to drive more traffic to my main Celtnet site


Hay Fever Information

Celtnet Site Description

Information about Acne

Improve your Google Rankings with In-bound Links

Introduction to How Mobile Phones Work

In desperation I've even resorted to buying an internet course: Profit Lance which is reviewed in the site given here. Reviews are good and the course definitely looks comprehensive so I'm going ahead with it at the moment I'll report back at a later date so say whether it's worthwhile or not.

Amongst the various on-going projects I've also resurrected my Celtnet Information eZine and have begun posting to this weekly rather than fortnightly. I'll see if this starts to bring-in any more sign-ups.

Well, that's today's view from the trenches. I now need to go back to doing some serious marketing.

Continuing on the Optimization Track

Since my last post about the new Mobile Phone Information section of my site and the way I'd used it as a model to alter the google adsense ad placements on my site I've been having a re-think of other sections of my site.

The latest to receive the adsense makeover is the how to build a PC from scratch section of my site. I've altered the page to give better usage of adsense ads, falling back on the classicc header ad, right sidebar ad and one ad within the text. But, as the page also deals with computers and computer components I've also added a fresh ad for Google's new Google Pack of free PC software (see ad on left). After all, if you're trying to upgrade or build your PC with components a nice suite of freee applications should appeal to you, right?

I certainly hope so as Google's lead payments for this can be up to $2. Which isn't bad at all!

Apart from this I've been adding more content to my recipe-based site and my mobile phone pages. I've even caught-up with the various submissions added to my Celtnet Links Page. Of the 440 submissions during the past three months all bar five were for either adult or pharmaceutical sites. Why do these people bother, I wonder? Now I'll have to write some software to week out these guys. But that should only take me a couple of hourse. Ah, the trials and tribulations of an internet marketer!

Well, that's all for today, folks. I now have to get back to actually doing things to the website to make money :-)

To your continued success!

Breaking the Cardinal Rule

With everything that's been happening in my life recently I didn't have much time to check my website since I moved to a new hosting package. Of course, now that I'm back on the web marketing route I find that I had broken one of the cardinal rules of web marketing 'make sure that everything on your website is working'. A quick review of my eBay and Clickbank search pages revealed that because of internal Perl permissions my eBay Misspelled Listings Search Tool wasn't giving the correct misspelling suggestions. Of course, this was easy to fix. But I had lost many months' worth of traffic, income and good will. All things that will take time and effort to put right again.

Even worse, in some respects, I had completely missed one entire database in the transition so that none of my ClickBank Search pages were working at all. Not the marketplace search itself, nor the associated ClickBank article search section. The only part of my website working was the Amazon products feed search page. But this would not really attract any visitors to the site without the other pages working, as these would be the draws to traffic.

It took me half a day to fix all the problems. But I had lost almost four months' worth of both traffic and revenue. Of course, the site now works perfectly and integrates seamlessly with Amazon. Indeed, it works better than many of the other eBay misspelling tools out there. Which was my intent all along.

Now that other events in my life, such as marriage, getting my wife and her son a visa, are almost done I'm back to using my eBay Misspelled Listings Search Tool for the purpose that I originally designed it for. That is, for finding items that are misspelled on eBay and which no-one is bidding on. These can then be purchased cheaply and re-sold for a profit!

If you want to learn more about this, then why not look at my article on the subject: http://EzineArticles.com/?Using-Misspellings-to-buy-items-Cheaply-on-eBay&id=172957 which can be found at ezinearticles.com.

And, yes, I really do make money using this technique. I've also used it to cheaply source components for building a PC as well as buying SLR camera lenses and accessories. If you want to save moeny, just as I have done, why not give the tool a go? It works for all the major English-based eBay sites and using my Internationalization System it will even detect which country/region you are from so that you automatically get your own native eBay page offered to you.

Wishing you success in your internet marketing campaigns. And, don't forget, never take your eye off the ball!

Dyfed Lloyd Evans