CMS Should Be Easy…

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Peter

And that’s why I have introduced easyCMS to the world today. easyCMS is the combination of 3 months of development to create a CMS that is targeted at webmasters and internet marketers looking for an easy way to create dynamic adsense sites.

easyCMS Promises To Make CMS Easy (yeah, we’re still working on the slogan!)

I’ve always felt that a CMS should be about managing your content, not about managing your design and layout. A CMS should be a useful tool to make your website interactive and dynamic, not try to control every aspect of your website.

So often I have gotten frustrated with the willingness of CMS developers trying to make the CMS everything to everyone that it becomes so complex and tricky it actually becomes unusable. Take Joomla for example. It’s a great CMS, with tonnes of tools. But why should I be told where the menu has to go and control all the menu options from the admin area? Why is the templating system only accessible to those that have degrees in rocket science? It’s too much.

Or how about Drupal? Another great CMS, but a degree in nuclear physics is a requisite if you plan on using the admin area or attempting to create a complete new design.

Why is easyCMS different?

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Top 5 On-Page Optimization Tips

Posted on July 28, 2007 by Peter

When most people think of search engine optimization (well ok, only those that are actually nerdy enough to know what it is of course!) they immediately think about meta tags, keyword density and doorway pages.

Like many things when it comes to SEO, what once worked no longer does.

Take meta-tags for example. Way back when the internet was still a baby, meta tags were introduced to help search engines (at the time the big search engine was AltaVista…Google hadn’t even been invented) work out what the site was about. It wasn’t long before people started abusing the Meta Tags and when the next generation of search engines came about the importance of the meta tags diminished forever.

There are some self styled gurus that will tell you that you need the optimum keyword density to rank well in the search engines. The truth is, if there were an optimium density then it would be very easy to rank in the search engines. The best thing to do is to keep your writing natural and focus on the reader first, search engine second.

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Climate Change & Offsetting

Posted on July 27, 2007 by Peter

Are We All Doomed?

Recently I watched a program that casts some serious doubts over many corporations claims that they are green or carbon neutral.To my mind, this entire “climate change” hysteria is being fuelled and fanned by the media. A couple of years ago it was Avian Flu that was going to decimate half the world’s population, before that it was SARS that was going to be the biggest killer of them all. Now it’s global warming and climate change.

Although there is no doubt that global warming is happening, I can’t see it as being the catastrophic disaster that the media is portraying it to be – simply because they’ll sensationalize any bit of bad news to make more money.

Nothing quite sells like bad news. Telling people “You are all going to be worse off! Find out why by buying our newspaper”. It’s a sure fire winner.

Anyway, climate change is now the buzz word and even the people living under rocks will be aware of it (you may have heard them comment that rocks are not like they used to be).

Never too far behind to miss a trick to make more money, many corporations are now jumping on this green bandwagon to give their corporate image that fluffy happy look. To be “carbon neutral” is the big thing. To leave the smallest possible “carbon footprint” is the goal.

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Are You Making These Top 5 SEO Mistakes?

Posted on July 25, 2007 by Peter

To the average internet user the acronym SEO is just yet another bit of gobbledegook internet jargon tossed around by web geeks and nerds. To some of us web geeks and nerds SEO is the be all and end all of internet promotion. The holy grail of appearing at number one spot on Google is a dream many of us aspire to bring in to reality…but often fall dismally short in Supplemental Hell.

So often the different between getting a good ranking and a bad ranking is down to how you approach the optimization of your site. As with most things in life there’s a right way and a wrong way. Do it the wrong way and you’re looking at a life in Supplementalville, do it right and you get to live on the converted home page bringing in so many visitors you won’t know what to do.

Sidenote: Google’s Supplemental Index are results that it gives when it can’t find anything definite that you are searching for. Web pages in the supplemental index are pages that don’t have enough inbound links for Google to ‘trust’ the page enough to serve it up as a main result.

If you want to get good rankings, then make sure you avoid these top 5 SEO mistakes:

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GoDaddy Update: I Am Not Alone!

Posted on July 25, 2007 by Peter

A few weeks ago I posted about how bad I though GoDaddy were and how bad the website interface was.

Well, I was doing a bit of reading the other day and it turns out that I’m not the only one who has issues with GoDaddy (we should probably all sign up to therapy and get a group discount). While the whole RegisterFly saga was unfolding, there was one site that everyone went to called RegisterFlies.com.

They were one of the first sites to break the (bad) news that GoDaddy was buying the RF customer database and transferring all the domains.

Anyway, I came across this post:

http://www.registerflies.com/myblog/godaddy-and-shady-transfer-policy.html

Which talks about GoDaddy’s shady transfer policy that is allegedly in blatant breach of ICANN’s policy (ICANN is the American based non-profit organisation that overseas and controls all .com domains – often referred to as ICANN’T due to their inability to take action).

Amongst some of the comments to the above article I came across some gems:

Here are some other reasons godaddy sucks.
1 they lie on there website and make you agree to not transfer your domain if you update your whois. This is just dishonest. Nothing in ICANN policy allows for this.

2, They have a reputation for shutting down sites based on uninvestigated complaints.
If someone complains that you are spamming with your domain they shut you down without any investigation. The burden is on you to prove you werenÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t

3, They have a link in there whois to report false whois. Let me ask you; what qualifies any joe blow who looks up my domain in the whois to determine if the whois is false. This is asking for abuse. The type of abuse that led to the theft of familyalbum.com

By the way, and this is an aside. I found a domain I wanted the other day at godaddy that had false whois- bad email. Nothing can stop me from puttiing in a back order for it with godaddy and then reporting the false whois.
But I degress, let me go on.

4, Their control panel is the worst in Biz.

5 when You try to renew you have to deal with nonsense like having the renew auto set to 2 years and being upsold tons of junk on the long road to checkout.

6 [snip]

7. There is no grace period after your domain expires. The day it expires they will charge you a boatload of money to get it back. Reputalbe registrars dont pull this kind on nonsense. Why would anyone who knows anything about domains put up with this.

8 When you buy a domain at Godaddy or change your DNS to Godaddy, they steal your traffic for at least three days. ThatÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s right folks you heard it hear first. They steal your traffic for at least three days. At any ohter registrar you can start using your domain right away. By the way this is grounds for a class action lawsuit and I am sure some clever attorney will get on it eventually.

The list goes on, but if your are stupid enough to use godaddy you probably already stopped reading

You can read the rest of the comments on GoDaddy on this page:

http://www.registerflies.com/myblog/godaddy-and-shady-transfer-policy.html

Many people seem to have issues with the frustrating checkout process that GoDaddy have where they attempt to upsell you every product and service they have, try to get you to buy other domain extensions, default the registration period for two years and so on. For seasoned webmasters and domainers this is just tedious and infuriating. Definitely at the very least I think they should have an option in the users profile to have a quick checkout option that bypasses all that crap.

I’ve also come across this site that gives various horror stories about GoDaddy:

http://www.nodaddy.com

Top 5 Places To Buy a Website Template

Posted on July 23, 2007 by Peter

A website template is a pre-made design and layout that you can adapt to your own needs. For a designer it saves lots of time in coming up with a design, for the webmaster it’s a quick and easy way to get an attractive design for your website and for the small business owner it’s a cheaper way of having a professional look to your website.

The drawbacks to using website templates are that your design will never be unique – there may be lots of other websites out there with the same design – maybe even a competitor. Next, a template may not have the exact layout that you require (maybe the nav bar is in the wrong place or there’s not enough room for your logo or the menu has too many options that you don’t need) in which case you would end up paying a designer to modify the layout anyway.

However, given that there are tens of thousands of pre-made website designs available on the internet the chances of you having the same design as a competitor are extremely remote. Infact, given the cost advantages of pre-made templates, I think the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.

There are dozens of different website template stores online so knowing which is the right one can be a difficult task. I have composed a list of the top 5 website template stores that I highly recommend from personal use.

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And We Have Lift Off!

Posted on July 22, 2007 by Peter

Finally, after 18 months of development, thousands of man hours working on this project and tens of thousands of dollars later…HYIPJunction is launched to the world in a glittering and star studded launch party that…oh wait, there was no launch party, that was just Paul and I cracking open a couple of cans of beer to celebrate.

Launch

HYIPJunction will now take it’s place as the ultimate HYIP portal serving investors everything they need from one central location. They don’t need to go to half a dozen different sites to gather all their research for a program because it will all be right here on one site.

To celebrate the launch, we have various ongoing promotions allowing our members to earn money for advertising. We are also looking to take on people to help us run the site (there’s no way we could do it all by ourselves!).

Monetizing

Of course, there are any number of reasons that people should signup for an account on HJ, but true to our internet marketing roots we are offering some fast action signup bonuses such as ebooks and software for all those people that signup and confirm their email account. No other HYIP related site I know of does this.

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HYIPJunction: Project Disaster

Posted on July 19, 2007 by Peter

This article is about an outsourced programming project that I’ve been working on for the last 18 months and discusses all the things that went wrong and offers some advice to any would be project managers thinking of outsourcing their programming project.

If you don’t want to read this case study on how the project was a disaster and just want to read my top tips for outsourcing success, click here.

Around January 2006 I came up with an idea to create a super-mega portal out of nothing that focused on the HYIP arena – a underground, murky industry that thrives on the internet, although it’s generally not a very nice place to be. The reason I wanted to create a mega portal in this arena were simple: massive advertising dollars.

I started out as I had done with most projects that I’d done in the past and went about writing down some features that I wanted the site to have. I really pushed the boat out, I wanted it to have everything and be the all singing, all dancing site that would eclipse every other site in the industry (I call it an industry, but the term den of theives might be a more appropriate definition).

Just check out some of the features I was going to create with this site:

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A Bed In Which To Lie

Posted on July 16, 2007 by Peter

A bed to sleep in would be nice. It’s been a while. Over a week infact. I’m currently still bunked up on a couch in a front room in Brighton. My ‘room’ is full of my stuff (neatly boxed away) and thousands of old vinyl records. Moving the stuff out and into storage has been on the cards since the beginning of last week, but it’s yet to be done. It’s like that old shelf you keep meaning to put up. We all put things off.

Hopefully this week might be the week where I can sleep in a proper bed again. Maybe even tomorrow?! But for tonight it is another night on a couch.

Yesterday I went back up to London for my brothers g/f’s birthday. She had organised to go bowling (I suck at bowling!) and incredibly on the 9th frame (I think it’s called frames in bowling…it could be a game, I don’t know!) I was in the lead and looking to secure my first ever bowling victory. I was preparing my victory dance when suddenly out of no where one guy got two strikes on the 10th frame and one of the girls got a strike and a spare. My long deserved and hard fought victory was snatched away infront of my very eyes. Still, I came third out of 7 and I beat my little brother so it wasn’t a total washout.

I did notice that even though my brother is left handed, he naturally bowls with his right hand and didn’t even notice he was doing it until I pointed it out to him. Interesting, and true. Maybe if any other lefties are reading this they can shed some light on this; is it normal to be left handed but bowl with your right?

Anyway, that night (well, last night infact) I was introduced to another couch which was about half a person too short and situated in possibly the noisiest street in London (but of course, I was eternally grateful for a place to lie down for the night). I think I’m glad to get back to this couch in Brighton now. Makes you appreciate what you had when you no longer have it. In this case it’s a couch longer than me and peace and quiet after 11pm.

Peter Claridge

The Trials and Tribulations of a British Expat Living in India

Monthly Archives: July 2007

CMS Should Be Easy…

Top 5 On-Page Optimization Tips

Climate Change & Offsetting

Are You Making These Top 5 SEO Mistakes?

GoDaddy Update: I Am Not Alone!

Top 5 Places To Buy a Website Template

And We Have Lift Off!

HYIPJunction: Project Disaster

A Bed In Which To Lie