Crazy Egg Web Page Heatmap

October 8th, 2006

Here’s a nifty tool from a company called crazyegg. It’s a utility that will track user activity with a little bit of javascript on your specified webpages and will create some nice tracking information. I’m particularly interested in the heatmap it’s supposed to generate so I can see graphically which areas of my pages get the most clicks. I’ve currently got it running on:
crazyegg logo
http://www.firmscode.com/index.php
http://www.itintl.com/index.php
http://www.1km1kt.net/index.php

Just view the source code and search for “crazyegg” on the page to see the javascript.

No results yet, but I’ll post some images as soon as they come back. Here’s an example from their site.

Crazy Egg Heatmap

Update

I’ve gotten my first heatmap back for 1km1kt.net and WOW am I impressed! The detail it gave me is nothing new – I’ve always known where my clicks were going and what my visitors were doing from my reports, but I’ve never seen it laid out like this before. I’m a visual learner, so seeing a graphical representation like this immediately got me thinking of ways to improve the site. Here’s what’s come back in the past hour or so:

1km1kt heatmap

Off the top of my head, here are my initial thoughts:

  • My ads are in the right place. They get the majority of the clicks already, so I’m not going to move them.
  • Game titles are having an effect on click throughs – I need to let the site authors know that so they can maximize their traffic.
  • Crazyegg is tracking not only what gets clicked on, but the exact spot the user is clicking. See that one on the EVE Online banner at the bottom of the “V”? That’s me.
  • Lots of people are clicking on the “Free RPGs” link at the top of the page. I need to check on that page to make sure it’s got a good design.

I’m sure there’s more I can get out of this as it develops, but for a start that’s pretty good.

Searching for robots.txt files

October 7th, 2006

The idea behind a robots.txt file is simple – place a static text file at the front door of your website with a listing of files and directories that you do not want search engine robots to index.
Robots txt Search Logo
There are two problems with this concept:

1) Participation is at the robot programmer’s discretion. If you can program a search robot (or search spider as they’re sometimes called), you can program it to ignore the robots.txt standard.

2) By publishing a list URLs you don’t want indexed, you’re also publishing a list of top-secret cool stuff on your site. Take it one step further and start developing a robots.txt search tool, and you can start to see the bigger problem.

My suggestion is that if you have cool stuff on your site that you want protected, consider using the robots meta tags nofollow and noindex. This keeps you from having to publish a road map to your secrets while still making use of the robots.txt standard.

Here’s a quick search just for sites with a published robots.txt file.

More helpful hints:

Search spiders invariably look for a robots.txt file when the visit your site. Create a blank one to allow full access and reduce the number of “file not found” errors in your error log.

Use your robots.txt file to block whole directories rather than single files. Unscrupulous surfers my know which directories you’re protecting, but they’ll still have to guess at file names. Be sure to create a blank index.html file and turn off indexing so you don’t display your protected directory content to the world.

Pagrank Update

October 6th, 2006

Google PageRank, the arbitrary ranking system instituted by Google has recently been updated for some of my websites. I don’t pay too much attention to this statistic because it’s important to have multiple sources of traffic and not to rely on any single source. I do, however, note when the rankings are updated because they typically mean my sites will be moving around in the search results which can have an impact on my bottom line.

Average PageRank for the majority of my sites until today was 5 (on a 0-10 scale). I don’t have any sites that have broken a 6 or higher. Today’s update seems to have made some changes, bringing most of my sites down to a 4 with one or two 5’s mixed in for good measure. During a period of change, there’s always a little fluctuation and the results don’t finalize for a day or so. It’s actually a little terrifying sometimes when your PageRank drops from a 5 to 0 for several days while Google updates its index!

Like I said, PageRank is just one measure of site performance and is in no way a stand-alone indicator of a site’s health. A far better indicator is my own personal gut feeling that my sites provide useful and relevant information and resources and the traffic statistics to support it.

Adwords Position Preferences

October 5th, 2006

If you’re using Google Adwords and are unhappy with either your cost per click or your ad placement, consider the position preferences option for your campaigns.

Using position preference, you can target your bid to aim for a specific position in the ad lineup rather than always trying to be number one. I’ve found that by forgoing the competition for the #1 spot, I’ve lowered my cost per click by as much as 60%. Not only that, but with well written ads I’ve seen a negligible drop in click throughs.

Try aiming your ads at the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th positions. Often times the top one, two or three ads will appear in a separate section of the page leaving whatever ad didn’t make the cut in the top position on the right hand column. This is hard to describe, so check out the picture to see what I mean.

Position Preferences

The Google Heatmap

October 5th, 2006

Google HeatmapGoogle has developed a short tutorial for users asking the question “where should I place my ads for the best click-through rate?” Although useful for answering that question, Google’s tutorial also offers a good overview for which parts of a web page draw the most attention. Check out the full tutorial or go directly to the Google Heatmap.

Targeting your market

October 4th, 2006

I recently had an experience I thought might be of value to anyone who wants to know a little more about the benefits of online marketing.

Last month I remodeled my upstairs bathroom and on one of several trips to the local Home Depot, I came out of the store to find a flyer on my windshield under my wiper blade. I get these every once in a while and normally I discard them because they’re usually advertisements that I’m just not interested in. This one, however, was different.

The flyer from the Home Depot parking lot was from an individual who was interested in selling a set of five wheels and tires that would fit a 1995-2001 Ford F-150 pickup truck or Ford Expedition. A quick glance around the parking lot showed that the only cars who had received the flyer were individuals like myself who were driving the year and model car that matched with the wheels and tires in the ad. I’m not normally one for shiny wheels, but I took an extra few seconds to read the flyer carefully, look at the pricing, and put it in my back pocket for later. I can only imagine that the other car owners who received the flyer did the same. At the very least I expect that each one took time for a second glance and one may very well have purchased some new tires!

This individual’s marketing method is spot-on advice for most of my clients. Yes, online advertising is a numbers game but by targeting a small, highly qualified audience, you can maximize the return on investment from your advertising dollars. Try one of the following to help target your audience more effectively:

  • Use your current client email database to solicit additional business from your existing customers. As prior customers you know immediately that they have an existing need for your type of product or service. Why not share with them some of the similar or complimentary products/services you have to offer?
  • Many pay-per-click advertising campaigns offer the ability to restrict your ads by time of day and geographic location. Try using these filters so that you spend the most money when potential clients are most likely to purchase and where they’re most likely to come from.
  • Build an online marketing list by offering a free product that would appeal to a potential customer. A good example is our free report from the Department of Commerce entitled A Nation Online: Entering the Broadband Age that details internet usage statistics for American consumers including their reasons for going online, their most frequent online activities, and their socio-economic category.

Resources and Bookmarks

October 3rd, 2006

I’ve got a few resources I use on a day to day basis for web-design, personal projects, etc. I thought I would share a few of them here today:

DeGraeve.com hosts a color palette generator that’s useful for designing a page layout around a particular image. The palette generator breaks down the image into 10 or so of the most prolific colors and makes it easy to coordinate a layout.

Alertra.com is an uptime monitoring company and their spotcheck tool will tell you how fast your website is loading from multiple locations. Their pay service is worthwhile as well, and not that expensive

4webhelp.net offers a convenient .htpasswd encryption tool that I use to encrypt user passwords. When I use the tool, I normally just enter “test” in the Name field.

Feedburner.com is a good resource for developing your RSS readership. They offer some good tracking tools as well as some other features to help you get the most out of your feed.

What kind of websites get the most traffic?

October 2nd, 2006

I’ve found that there are two types of websites that generate large amounts of traffic right off the bat. Both have to do with the amount and type of content found on each site.

Before I get into the type of content I recommend for most site owners, I’d like to ask the following question:

Why do you go online?

For me, there are two parts to the answer and each answer reflects a different type of website.

  1. I’m looking for highly specific information (addresses, telephone numbers, product manuals, how-to guides, images, software, etc.)

    With this in mind, consider building a website that offers a highly focused and specific type of information. A lot of new website owners think that they need to tap into the massive marketplaces that some of the world’s largest websites leverage for traffic, and offer things like general news, broad reaching articles, and simple services.

    In fact, the exact opposite is true. My most effective websites offer very limited, but highly targeted bits of information. AutomatedManifest.com is an excellent example. By offering a tool to look up US Customs AMS error messages I’ve seriously limited my audience, but I make up for it with a growing number of subscribers who desperately need just that information. That site has quickly become an authority on the topic and is the first stop for anyone needing that type of information. Database driven websites or focused articles both make effective target audience websites.

    It is important to remember that there are 300 million people in the US alone, and nearly 60% of them go online at least once a day. Just because your content is focused doesn’t mean people aren’t interested in it.

  2. I have a give and take destination in mind – an online tool or resource that I’m already aware of that I want to either contribute to, use for my own purposes, or both.

    Examples of this type of website are online forums, blogs, or services. These are websites that I’m already aware of that offer an online tool that is beneficial to me. This type of website has an enormous amount of potential, but can require a lot of maintenance and upkeep. The effort on the front end is usually much higher as well. Before you can have an online tool, you must first build that tool from scratch or implement a pre-built solution. Neither of which is a small undertaking. Once built, you will need to introduce your site to others and sell its return appeal. Both of these can be difficult with a new website.

    Once built however, the benefits of these destination websites significantly outweigh the time invested. With an online forum for example, you can rely on users to maintain and add to the website with little intervention on your part. As the site develops, traffic builds exponentially as users add more content, that content drives more traffic, and that traffic results in more users. My import/export forum is a good example of this kind of undertaking. A blog is s similar undertaking.

    By developing a site that acts as a destination for internet users, you can leverage your userbase to generate search engine traffic, an effective email marketing campaign, or viral marketing strategy.

There are many other types of websites and many ways to be successful. Before building one, ask yourself what you’re looking for online and build something from that experience. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Sign up for the newsletter

October 2nd, 2006

If you’re reading the company blog, you’re obviously interested in what’s going on at Danifer Web Services. So, why haven’t you signed up for the newsletter? Use the form below and sign up now.

(Did I mention I send out free offers and other cool stuff just to the newsletter subscribers?)

Dallas Fort Worth DFW Web Design

October 2nd, 2006

I do a lot of self-promoting on this blog, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I’m in the Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) area. About 25%of my client base is local, and the rest are outside the immediate area so I forget to mention where I’m located. I’ve recently started doing some local networking, so this is becoming more important.

That said, if you’re looking for a web designer, online marketing company, or general consulting in the DFW area please feel free to contact me.

Aesthetic Websites

October 1st, 2006

A pretty website design is important, but I like to focus more on functionality than appearances. Why? Because I’ve learned that presentation is a distant second to traffic when it comes to online selling. Think about it – your beautiful site sees 100 visitors a day and converts a whopping 5% into paying customers (that’s 5 customers for the math illiterate). Compare that to a clean, less artsy site that sees 1,000 visitors a day and only converts 1% (10 customers). Which do you think you’ll make more money on?

Here are some of my favorite websites that put more emphasis on functionality than they do appearance:

Google
Digg
Technorati
Woot
FeedBurner

Google Alerts

September 30th, 2006

Do you get Google Alerts? They’re a free way to monitor your site’s standings on the world’s biggest search engine. Try creating a Google Alert for site specific searches like:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3awww%2edanifer%2ecom
Which will show you how many pages your site has in the Google index

or

http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3awww%2edanifer%2ecom
which will show you how many site Google has tracked that link in to you.

Try it out yourself at: http://www.google.com/alerts

Quinntastic

September 30th, 2006

A friend of mine mentioned to me that he reads my blog regularly, which blows me away. I’m continually amazed when people mention any of my sites and that they gain something useful from them. This particular vote of confidence really got me jazzed up about blogging (hence the four previous posts from today).

Anyway, thanks Mike!

Forced Obsolescence

September 30th, 2006

I heard an interesting term today called forced obsolescence. It was used in reference to Windows 98 being a perfectly functional and usable operating system, but it was being forced into retirement before its time by Microsoft. By cutting off all the support for the project, they’ve made it an obsolete piece of software. Since the single web page experiment is going so well, I thought this might make a good topic for a one-off project. I’ve got a lot on my plate, so if you want to run with it help yourself. A link back to danifer.com would be appreciated.

A Bump in Traffic

September 30th, 2006

I’m a little blog-happy today, so I’ll post about a recent swell of traffic on firmscode.com, the US Customs warehouse database site that’s part of my group of importing websites. Until recently, it’s been holding steady at 150-200 visitors a day (a very respectable number for a site that requires so little upkeep). It’s a database driven site listing the four digit alpha-numeric number that US Customs assigns to every warehouse approved to receive international import freight. This number is required for many Customs transactions, but the list is fairly inaccessible unless you have an expensive program that ties in with US Customs.

The site is popular both with new users searching for the FIRMS codes, but at least half its traffic comes from return visitors using it as a tool in their day-to-day operations. Businesses like Customs brokers, freight forwarders, etc. I actually take some pride that employees from my previous employer use the site daily as an online tool.

Anyway, Google has been doing some updates and has finally recognized the site as an online authority for the information it offers. Here’s a picture of my recent stats showing a 200%+ increase over the last few days. Hopefully the trend will keep up and we’ll see even more in October.

September Statistics for Firmscode.com

Less is More

September 30th, 2006

I recently made an adjustment to the ads I’m serving on 1km1kt.net. I eliminated one of three ad units on the page in favor of a monthly billed banner placement. The result was very positive! By eliminating one of the ad units, I caused the remaining units to display fewer, higher paying ads. The effect was an increase in income from the Google AdSense program, along with a revenue bump from the direct-bill skyscraper ad. The logic makes sense, but I guess I wasn’t expecting the results to be so dramatic.

DFW Poker Tournaments

September 30th, 2006

I built BERNinc. for a customer about a year ago for his poker tournament business. He brings just-for-fun poker tournaments to bars and restaurants (primarily in the DFW area, but also in Houston). I’ve been doing the updates on the site – tournament leader boards, new venues, etc. for quite some time and he’s recently asked me to add on a forum to generate more traffic to his site. Rather than add a forum onto his existing site, I registered a new domain name in order to maximize his keyword potential.

The new site is http://www.texaspokerplace.com. Here are some of the potential benefits:

  • He’s already got a strong offline user base with a common interest.
  • Poker players love to talk about poker. Games they’ve played, beatings they took, strategies, etc.
  • A forum allows the membership to involve themselves in the game on a daily basis rather than every week at the tournaments. Hopefully this will draw more existing users to the tournaments by peaking their interest in their off-time.
  • The keywords in the domain name are more focused. The theme of the site is currently DFW poker tournaments (and that’s who we’re trying to draw), but could easily be adjusted to refer to Texas holdem style poker as the site grows.
  • I’m hosting the forum on my server which gives me more control over the site management – something that’s critical when it comes to community based websites.
  • Having two sites helps to generate additional buzz. TexasPokerPlace.com will not only serve as the online community for the BERN inc. poker league, but will also be open to non-league members. This will increase both site traffic as well as provide more opportunity for cross promotion.

Networking at BNI in Southlake

September 28th, 2006

Yesterday I was invited to attend a business networking event called BNI in Southlake. I’m horrible about getting out and networking and generally rely on referral business, but I thought this would be a great opportunity to meet some new people.

The event was early and across town, but I was pleasantly surprised at the content! The meeting was short enough that I didn’t get bored and the presentations were worthwhile.

The meet and greet before and after the event was pleasant and relaxed. I wasn’t there specifically to generate leads (since I hate being too much like a used car salesman at a networking event), but I was interested in learning about some of the different industries the members were in. I’m always surprised at the number of ways people have found to be successful, and I like to listen to them talk about their businesses.

I’m definitely going to get involved in either this group or one similar, and hats off to the BNI group.

New Project: ImportAssist.com

September 24th, 2006

ImportAssist.com is the newest partner site under the Informed Trade International umbrella. Seeing as how Informed Trade has a solid membership base, I decided to spin off a blog hosting service for importers, exporters, and people involved in international trade. With even a few reputable sources posting to ImportAssist.com, I hope to turn it into a resource for import business advice.

Croptastic!

September 12th, 2006

I spent today building Croptastic!, a blogging/social networking site for J’s members over at ScrapLove. The site is powered by a really cool piece of softwared called Drupal. It’s my first real venture into a content portal management system (CMPS), and I’m very pleased. The controls are excellent, it’s got a lot of management features for me and neat-o stuff for the users, it installed and customized quickly, the community is very active, and the addon features are literally load and go.

All in all I’m thrilled. If you’re looking for a really cool CMPS system, I highly recommend Drupal. And if you’re looking for a place to blog about scrapbooking, check out Croptastic!

Tim Holtz Visits ScrapLove

September 9th, 2006

I thought this deserved a mention:

Apparently, J’s website ScrapLove.com has been gaining in popularity among the scrapbooking celebs! Tim Holtz, a big time playa in the scrapbooking industry recently granted an interview to one of J’s crew. This is kind of a big deal because he has declined to interview on some of the bigger scrapbooking competitor sites. Go ScrapLove!

Check out the full Tim Holtz scrapbooking interview.

Free Advertising

September 9th, 2006

Giving away free banner advertising on 1km1kt has really had an impact on its growth. I offer other people placement in the site’s banner rotation and they place a static link to 1km1kt. This results in a whole lot of incoming links (for the search bots to see) while only having one outgoing link at a time visible for SEO purposes. Don’t think that it’s an entirely one-sided equation though – the advertisers on the site get a good amount of traffic via their highly visible banner from 1km1kt (which is becoming quite popular). I’ve recently implemented the same strategy on firmscode.com and portcodes.com to see if I can achieve the same results.

Site updates: portcodes and firmscode

September 9th, 2006

Last night I updated two of my database driven websites, firmscode.com and portcodes.com. Both are part of the Informed Trade International group of sites because they offer US Customs info and resources. I particularly like them because they’re database driven and require very little maintenance from me, while offering a very useful tool to the import/export community.

Firmscode in particular is quite popular and gets most of it’s traffic from people who have bookmarked the site. Aside from being a tidy little earner, it’s cool to have produced an online tool that people find useful enough to come back to. One of my shining moments before leaving the freight-forwarding industry was when someone brought up firmscode.com in a department meeting (totally unprompted) and cited it as a resource. Ten minutes later one of my co-workers sent out the broadcast email that I was the author! I don’t think people understand that a lot of times websites originate from one person. I think a lot of people have in their minds that websites just spring into existence on their own. That’s fine by me.

Donations

September 1st, 2006

I accept donations primarly on itintl.com, and I received my first one the other day! Oddly enough it came via firmscode.com, but what the hey, I’m not complaining! Along with the actual cash ($100) there was the pride in knowing that I had made an online tool useful enough to warrant a donation, which was cool.

Scrap To It!

September 1st, 2006

So, I’ve found myself doing some web design/maintenance work in addition to running my websites. I really avoided doing it at first, because I wanted to focus on building and maintaining my own sites. I’ve had to reverse my thinking on this 1) so I can meet my monthly revenue goals, 2) because it’s kind of fun and a nice break, and 3) because people keep asking me to do it!

I’m really surprised by the last one. In the last week, I’ve had three large projects put in front of me as well as several quickie fixit type requests. What surprises me about this is that the work is completely unsolicited! Are web designers really that hard to find or is a question of quality or some other factor?

Anyway, check out a recent project I did for one of J’s scrapbooking buddies: http://www.scraptoit.com

A Little Promotion Goes a Long Way

August 29th, 2006

I’m always surprised at the power of grassroots marketing and I forget how important it is! Take one of my favorite sites http://www.firmscode.com. Firmscode is a free online tool for looking up the four digit alpha-numeric code assigned by US Customs to warehouses that are approved to handle freight before it is legally entered into the country.

Firmscode probably doesn’t have much interest for most people, but it is an extremely valuable resource for the trade community (Custom warehouses, importers, exporters, freight-forwarders, etc.). Because it is a one-of-a-kind online resource, it dominates the search engines for the term “Firms code” and gets a lot of repeat visitors from people in the industry everyday. I know they’re repeat visitors because they don’t have a referrer URL (meaning they typed the URL into their browser bar or they have it bookmarked), and I know they’re in the industry because I will on occasion use this IP Lookup tool to see where their IP addresses are registered. Most of the time the larger freight forwarders are listed on the registration information.

Despite being such a great resource, traffic and visitors to the site are growing at a snails pace. It proves the adage that you can have the best online content in the world, and if no one knows about it, you’ll never get anywhere.

With this in mind, yesterday I sent out an alert email to 7,000 members of the Informed Trade International opt-in mailing list. The response has been fantastic! Not only was there a groundswell of new users (which I’m sure will turn into repeat visitors), but the traffic has doubled and I even received a $100 donation from someone who needed this exact tool, but couldn’t find it anywhere else.

I’m pretty pleased with these results. Just goes to show that it’s important to split time evenly between quality content and marketing if you want a successful website.

Vonage

August 27th, 2006

I was recently asked to give a recommendation regarding VOIP for home service. Here’s what I said:

I’ve been using Vonage for more than a year and can recommend it as a good alternative to traditional phone service. You’ll have to have high-speed internet and I’ve used it successfully with a Comcast cable modem.

Pros:
Free national calls,
It’s inexpensive,
The invoice is always the same amount,
some of the online features like call logging are cool.

Cons:
Susceptible to power outages,
Quality can degrade if you have a high bandwidth drain on your internet connection.

Overall, my wife and I use our cell phones for most of our calls and have Vonage as for the convenience of having a home phone. It’s worked out pretty well so far.

Import Duty

August 22nd, 2006

Since the single web page experiment seems to be going well, I’ve decided to expand the concept into a more practical site. I’ll be monitoring import duty carefully over the next few months to see if it’s drawing traffic for its preferred key phrase “import duty.”

1KM1KT .pdf linkage

August 19th, 2006

I’m particularly proud today of one of the features of 1km1kt that prevents people from linking directly to the .pdf files from the outside. The purpose of this is twofold:

1KM1KT’s primary content comes from the downloading of .pdf files which can get rather large in size and consume a large amount of bandwidth. By preventing people from linking to the .pdf’s directly, we can encourage visitors to visit the landing page for that piece of work. The effect is that visitors see the contributing author’s landing page, have the opportunity to browse for other work, can see the author’s other contributions, and can view announcements from 1KM1KT.

This is all done with a rewrite rule in the .htaccess file:

#Restrict hotlinking of specified file types from all but specified referrer and blank referrers
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} \.(pdf)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !1km1kt\.net [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !bloglines\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*).pdf /redirect.php?Terms=$2&url:www.1km1kt.net/$1 [R,NC,L]

It not only prevents hotlinking from all but the specified sources (we still want google to be able to link to .pdfs as well as 1km1kt), but instead of just denying the user, it redirects them to a custom landing page built using the file name as a search term. Try it out here:

http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/1km1kt.pdf

This keeps us from losing traffic with broken external links, and still allows us to guide the user experience through the site.

vBulletin

August 17th, 2006

I’ve recently installed vBulletin forum software on 1km1kt and Informed Trade International. Both had long-standing forums powered by phpbb, but they had fallen into disrepair because I simply didn’t have enough time to deal with them. Seeing as how they both still have an active membership, and it’s a great way for the sites to expand, I invested a little money into software that should make management easier and give the users a better experience overall.

SingleParentingJournal.com

August 12th, 2006

I’d like to welcome Single Parenting Journal as the newest Danifer.com SiteShare parnter site. SingleParentingJournal.com will be an online resource for single parents from the point of view of a couple of single moms. They’ve already covered some interesting topics like making quality time for the kids, dining out, homeschooling and more. Check out the site today – I think it’s going to be really popular.

From their about page:

The Single Parenting Journal is an online resource for single parents. It’s written by actual single parents from their point of view and contains informative articles to provide assistance with everything from balancing work and children to the financial challenges of single parenthood.

Newsletters are still effective

August 9th, 2006

I’m continually amazed at the response I get from newsletters. Every time I send one out, it means a bump in traffic, more sign-ups, volunteers, sales, etc. I recently wrote an article on one piece of software in particular called Group Mail that I’ve been using. If you’re considering a newsletter and have a friendly ISP, it’s definitely worth the look.

Viruses

August 7th, 2006

My computer crashed today due to a really nasty virus. I was looking up Photoshop tutorials for J to work on the new Informed Trade International logo and all of a sudden it took off. It broke free of the popup blockers and overwhelmed Norton Antivirus corporate. Once the virus had really set itself (took approx. 15 seconds) it started trying to shut my computer down. I fought and fought but it finally won.

Once the computer had shutdown, it wouldn’t come back up. I could log in, but all I could see from there was the wallpaper without a start menu, icons, or other controls. Long story short, I spent the first half of today re-installing Windows from scratch. None of my data seems to be harmed which is good because my backups have been sketchy lately, but the productivity loss sucks.

I don’t get why people design these things. I can’t figure out what would be worth the repercussions of making a virus like that. Why don’t people just spend their time creating something worthwhile rather than destroying everything around them? When I think of the time, effort, and creativity that went into creating a virus to destroy my data, it makes me sad.

Informed Trade International

August 7th, 2006

This week is all about promoting the new forum on www.itintl.com, my importing website. The software (vBulletin) is tried and tested at ScrapLove, and I’m hoping it does well here. Honestly, ITI is one of my most profitable sites (because of its market niche) and there’s nothing better than an active community to really ramp up a traffic.

vBulletin Pros and Cons

Pros
It’s been around for a while,
J has been using it without problem for a long time now,
it’s a quality piece of software.

Cons
Resource intensive,
$90 dollar price tag for a one year lease,
Really complicated

Look for a rollout of this same software on 1km1kt.net soon.

SWP Experiment and Site Makeovers

August 4th, 2006

Just a quick update for anyone following along:

singlewebpage.com

The single web page experiment is still doing well. It’s popping in and out of the #1 Google position for the term single web page, which as of today returns 695,000,000 other results. Traffic is low because the term is relatively unpopular, but it’s cool to see the theory at work. I’m posting the results in a .pdf as proof that at least it worked once.

Informed Trade Redesign

Informed Trade International recently underwent a major redesign. The goal was to enhance the user experience and brand the site a little more effectively without disrupting (or hopefully improving) the already high advertising revenues and product sales. I also wanted to improve visibility to the RSS feed and the newsletter features to try to boost the return rate to the site.

I don’t have much data to go on (since the change is only one day old), but click-through rates seem and sales are so far unaffected. Special thanks to J for the logo design. She really did a great job creating an identifiable symbol for the site.

How to Advertise and 1KM1KT: Free RPG Games

Both of these underwent fairly significant changes as well. Although they both have a product to sell (web hosting on one and affiliate sales on the other), the goal was really to push the newsletter and RSS feeds. How to Advertise is pretty low traffic for the amount of effort I put into it, so hopefully the redesign will have a positive influence. 1KM1KT is one of the higher traffic site in my repertoire, and it’s already seen increased RSS circulation and lots of newsletter sign-ups.