Laptop Spares Website

This site was, a couple of years ago, my first full venture into a customer's site that allowed them to upload stock and sell it from their website. Since then the basic routines have been copied, evolved and updated into many more formats and lot's of other shops.

It also has the ability for the owner to add new sub-categories within the main categories and earlier this year, when he was having problems with postage, I wrote a customised basket (instead of using an off the shelf version), which is now in use in many of my other customer's sites - I developed for him free of charge! Hopefully it will expand in the future to allow clever tracking, offers etc.

The owner puts a lot of effort into publicising his site and values the traffic he gets from pop-under campaigns. He's regularly using them, so they must work for him.

It's a reasonably nice looking site - not overly fancy, but with it being more technical, that's what was caled for.

Oxford Accommodation Website

This site came to me as a referral - by the person who was selling the apartment!

The previous owner suggested to the new owner that I create a website, which I did. I quite liked the site, but the new owner never really had any marketing ideas and thought that creating a site was enough to guarantee bookings 52 weeks of the year.

The real shame is that the site went quickly to a PR5 and stayed there. I never worked out what in particular made it so popular with the search engines, but something did.

What I do notice though is that the previous owner's site was also PR5 for a time, then dropped. So I expect that the previous owner had the site listed in a good directory then removed it for whatever reason, but suggested to the new owner to get listed there. She did and benefitted.

The site has a load of useful functions and she did intend to develop it further into a directory, but seemed to loose interest. The accommodation has got some bookings, but it's not an easy game to be in.

Artist Portfolio Website

Another artist's website - this time a graphic design artist. She had quite strong ideas about what she wanted in the site so it was easy to put together. But her knowledge didn't go to some of the required updates of websites, so that's why she needed outside help.

Not only can she load various differently categorised portfolio samples, but there's also a news feature and latest biography for her to update.

Villa Website

This is without doubt the site that's taken me the longest to build and ended up with the biggest database and largest number of pages.

It's all about villa rentals, but unlike my cottage holidays sites, this isn't built from someone else's database. With this site owners can sign up to advertise their holiday villa and chose between paying a fixed annual fee or a commission per sale.

Religious Website

This website came to me as their current web designer was unwilling to support the site any more. Unfortunately, on the day the site went live the owners were taken ill and it took several months for them to recover and get the site back on track. Unfortunately, although I found out they were ill, I had no idea during this time what was going on!

The site has a members area where they can post prayers and messages to each other and also a shopping area, which displays affiliate banners to make a small income for the site owners.

Artist Brochure Website

This website was referred to me by a friend. The owner wanted to display a small portfolio for each of three artists for who he sells.

The website is simple and is split into sections for each artist, with a small gallery that rotates through each artist's portfolio on the page.

Triathlon Website

This website advertises the race and the arrangments as an addition to the club's own website.

Each year I'm passed the latest entry details and arrangements to update and sometimes, if I'm lucky, I'm passed a gallery after the even. I've never made the event myself - it's usually a bit to far for a race and comes at a time when I have other committments. Maybe one day.

Holiday Bookings Website

This one was for the same guy as had already had a couple of other affiliate style websites from me. He expected me to build affiliate websites for him then to sit back and cash the payments.

This one had everything - package holidays, flights, villas, travel insurance, car hire, airport transfers, airport parking... You name it! Apart from travel money (never yet found an affiliate scheme for that) he had it.

The idea when I met up with him was that he had a post office and would advetise the site and services to people in his post office. Given that a lot of people do go there for travel services, he had a great target audience. But then he decided as we went live to sell the post office.

This left him with no immediate way of promoting his site. I kept giving him ideas, but he just wanted a quick income for no work. Sorry, doesn't happen.

Anyway, after 2 years the site was allowed to go. Moral of the story - put nothin gin then expect nothing out!

Cottage Rental Website

This cottage rental site is a sister site to the first cottages website - it's a different look and optimised for different phrases, but it uses the same database.

Both were intended to drive affiliate commissions for me and the first site was doing really well, so I was hopefully that 2 sites would do great! This site didn't really pick up much traffic at first and I took my eye off the ball with both and traffic dropped because of the duplicate content filter (presumably) in Google.

I worked on this site and the traffic picked up quickly, now I'm working on a total refresh of the orignal site. The problem with both sites (at the moment) is that I take the database, build the sites using Perl on this machine and then FTP them. If the connection is unreliable, the FTP can fail several times and take hours to run. This means that I struggle to get the monthly updates done.

Going forward, I'll be loading the data straight to a database, which takes 5 minutes. From there I'll generate the pages, heavily depending on php includes to reduce the size of the file produced. There are a few other ideas for the refresh of both sites - should go well, but I'm keeping the ideas under my hat for now!

Mortgages Site

This was a 2nd financial related site consecutively, but for a different customer. This customer is a mortgage broker and wanted basically a calling card for people to refer to. There's a reasonable amount of information on the site, not a huge amount.

After a year he felt like a refresh so we built the look shown, then one of his friends said he could look after the site, so he took over the maintenance. Apparantly, the friend isn't getting changes done quickly enough so he's asked about moving the site back under our control!

Loans Website

This site was for the same customer as mentioned in the previous post and he's due to have another new site off me in the summer.

He is a loans arranger and has a group of brokers that pass him leads that he needed to be able to accept over the internet. He also wanted to be ablt to take leads direct from the public. So I built this nice, but simple, site for him that does just that.

I also send him leads from my mortgages site, for which he pays me a percentage of the commission when they complete. This site quickly got to PR4 without any real effort and as such the links swaps pages are very popular!

Home Working Website

This simple site was the first of a pair of websites for the same customer, who is talking about needing a third site in the middle of this year. Always nice to help returning customers!

This website advertises his Kleeneze recruitment business. He recruits sales people and further recruiters. So the site explains what is on offer and provides some information for downloading.

The owner's aim is to recruit enough people to provide him a happy retirement. He's been running the site slowly for a couple of years now, and I think he's well on target.

Mobile Phone Website

This one was very similar to the earlier mobile phone website. In fact, it was basically a copy, with different products.

The first site was for a customer and it was doing so well, very quickly, with search engine visitors that I decided to build my own copy, with a different datafeed.

Both sites were built using affiliate datafeeds, so all that I needed to do was to choose a different affiliate merchant and promote their phones. Lessons then learned from either site benefitted the other.

Unfortunately, I put effort into getting my copy some traffic, the customer expected it to happen my magic. My site is still out there (but it needs some TLC), his has been abandoned.

Endowment Mis_Selling Website

This was another venture into my own ideas. I already had a mortgage website running, so thought that connected with that it would be a good idea to run an endowment mis-selling website. Given I was going through the claim process myself at the time, it was on my mind!

So I set up this website, after travelling an hour each way to speak to a solicitor willing to buy leads from me. I generated a good number of leads and started off my own affiliate scheme (other affiliates generating leads for me).

But the solicitor was very slow responding to me and would take months to tell me which leads had signed instructions (the point at which I was paid). He asked me to see him again, so I travelled the hour there on the train, waited in reception for three quarters of an hour, because he was running late, then had a 2 minute chat with him then a few minutes with another guy. All both wanted to know was how to change their own website for better optimisation, nothing to do with what we were actually running together.

But it was taking ages to get cash from them. Usually a couple of months to confirm payments were due then even longer to chase up all of the outstanding invoices, so in the end I pulled out of the agreement. The website is still live, and will remain so until it expires, but just earning a bit of Google cash instead.

On the whole, I now stick to recognised affiliate schemes as they are far easier to get your cash from!