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!

Ebook Website

Here's a customer that does try very hard with their sites.

He writes ebooks and sells them through his one page sites. We started with a financial guides, that was eventually withdrawn because of the complexity of keeping up with FSA recomnendations.

Then came the 'How To Play Blues Piano', which is still about, followed by 'A Football Manager's Guide', which went live about a month ago.

He has promoted these through article writing and PPC as well as other methods. Sales aren't going to help him retire, but they are there as a reward to his efforts.

What's more, he's a good customer. Not only paying on time, but also easy to please and tells me exactly what he wants. I love customers to be like that!

Mobile Phone Website

This one was another site for the same guy as yesterday's post. He obviously thought he was onto a good thing - finding a cheap webdesigner who could quickly put together sites for him.

I do have my own (older!!!) version of a similar mobile phone site. I've used adsense, leaflets and other forms of advertising to promote it and got plenty of commission from it - more profit than he was paying me to build a site for him. But again, like yesterday, he expected me to build a site and it to run automatically for him, at no effort or cost.

It's sad because it was a good website and did instantly start getting search engine visitors. But with no work, a phone site quickly goes stale and loses the interest of the search engines. I did try to get him using simple techniques such as news or a blog, but he didn't have the time and patience. It was expected that it would only take me to build him a couple of web sites and then he could become a millionaire.

If only it was that easy! But for the sake of a few adverts, the website failed. It wouldn't have taken much - just a small google campaign or some pop under advertising.

Insurance Affiliates Website

This was one of those customers that thought if he paid me a couple of hundred pounds in return I'd give him a site that was top of google listings for every conceivable search keyword.

It didnb't seem like that at the start. I thought the site he wanted was a basic directory of insurance schemes for him to promote through his existing outlets. But no, when it went live he expected to sit bck, cash monthly cheques and maybe pay me a further hosting charge the following year.

I'd say he was disappointed! Yes, I built a directory site that looked good and generated some search engine visitors, but the number dropped off as he wasn't using a news feature nor adding any new merchants. There was no attempt at marketing the site, so it failed.

Yes, I can build sites that draw people in and tick over nicely, but they require work from me each month to maintain their positions and content, like comparemortgagerates. And if I'm putting in that much effort that you are earning thousands each month, do you think I'd just be charging you a couple of hundred a year?

Hotels Website

This one was another idea of my own - another affiliate scheme I worked with for a while, and still do promotes occasionally. But the site didn't get the traffic I wanted, was hard to maintain (hence the low traffic...) and I'd thought of a different way of running it so decided to change tack.

So how did this one go wrong? It was a good idea, but it just took a huge product feed (10,000 hotels), split them into regions and expected people to find them. There was no real attempt to provide anything new - no original content. And my update method involved building the whole site on my laptop (using perl scripts) and then uploaded. 10,000+ hotels, plus relevant regions - it was never going to work!

Worse still, after I registered the URL I did a search on it and found various references to it in Google - but they were before I registered the site. Then I started to read these references and the previous site owner had basically destroyed the reputation of the site with search engines and so got out.

So it was an uphil struggle and I never really got the site a suitable page rank, so I surrendered when the site was up for renewal and let it expire.

The affiliate scheme was a good one - but like many ideas, it's on the back burner as there's too much other work waiting to be done.

Personal Injury Directory Website

You can tell by looking back over the portfolio how by the time this site was written, the business was getting busier. The occurrences of own sites is reducing - well this is one.

I actually took the laptop away with me on a short holiday and wrote this site whilst I was on the holiday. It wasn't bad, but as business got busier, I just never had the time to develop it the way I wanted to. I'd intended to research loads of personal injury lawyers around the country and list them. I'd hoped for tons of traffic and generating leads to sell onto the lawyers.

I got the site in, with a respectible directory and had many requests for others to be listed into it. But I just never seemed to get the time to fully work on it - there was always customer work to be done instead. So I decided to concentrate on the mortgages and cottages websites instead. This one lasted until the URL renewal, at which point it was still receiving requests for new listings, then I let it drop.

A good idea, but as with many of my own I just couldn't afford the time to market and maintain the site. Such are the woes of a successful business!

Holiday Rental Villa Website

This was (and still is) a nice site that I get on with the owners well, even though I've never met nor spoken directly to them! Only ever emailed these customers, as with a lot.

They approached me for a quote when they were preparing to leave this country and set up their new rental business in Spain. They liked the quote, but decided to hang on until they were up and running before getting the site live. But I suggested we start straight away so that the search engines had chance to find the site. By including fresh photographs of the villas being built, it was also a very good way of showing friends and family back home the latest progress.

Eventually the villas were ready and we went ahead and built a full site, which they still continue to update regularly. Of course, for the first part of the life of the site, displaying the progress of the build, I gave them that as a freebie. So they were really pleased.

Travel Agent Website

This website was one of three websites all first published in a matter of weeks of each other and all for travel agents. What's more, all used the same affiliate scheme to provide their online booking for their package holidays.

This customer is still with us and is talking about extending out by specialising in the cruise market - so hopefully a new site there in a month or two. This one was bright and colourful, yet clean and professional looking. It was also an early venture into content management systems - with the owner able to add new offers, which are summarised on every page and displayed in full on a special page. The newer sites have a far easier to use system!

Property Website

This one wasn't a long lived customer! Quite an involved site and for a very good price (for him). I have noticed during my years of web design that those customers that pay the least expect the most - this one held that true.

There were loads of contact forms (used as surveys) on the site, with different questions dropping in and out of the screen depending on previous answers. It was a nightmare to code and even worse to test. There was always a question appearing when it shouldn't do, or one not appearing when it should.

When it came to the renewal time a year later he told me my charges were far too high and wanted to host the site himself. But he never came back asking for the code to host the site - I expect he realised that my charges were actually cheaper than anything he could get himself.

At least the site was more work and experience and another for the portfolio when we were just startign up and a little bit quiet.

Travel Agent Website

This site arrived to us as a referal from an existing customer. A travel agent with an existing site and relationships with suppliers, he wanted a new site that better comibined his offerings and gave a newer, fresher feel than the free site he already had.

We combined some vila schemes along with a package holiday affiliate scheme to provide plenty of choice for his customers, giving loads of earning potential.

A few of his standard pictures decorated the site, along with some graceful graphics to produce site any travel agent would love. In fact, during the build process another travel agent saw the site, and signed up for one himself!

Cottage Holidays Website

This is another of our own websites and one that has served us really well over the years. But, as I often write, it's in need of a bit of work now.

I did try to update the site a few weeks ago, but only got half way through it before work loads prohibited further changes, and to be honest, it's in dire need of finishing off.

It's a shame, really, because over the years it's more than earned it's keep in affiliate revenues and Google Adsense alike. Each has earned far more than I would have charged for such a site.

The basic idea is that we take a feed of aroun 1,700 cottages in the UK, add a few more from other feeds and produce this static site. There's loads more feeds I could integrate, but I just need the time.

This has got to be one of the top of my hit list to refresh, especially as when I just looked at it I found a couple of broken links.

Hopefully, by the end of February, a new version will be live. Shame it will have missed peak booking season. Oh well, there's always next year...

Holiday Flats Website

This was a simple website to advertise new a holiday flats business on the south coast.

Just a simple website to show what they had to offer. We had to convince the owners that they were not writing a tourist guide to the area as every bit of text sold the beauty and features for miles around, yet nothing mentioned the flats.

That's an important point to remember when creating a holiday flats website. The visitor to your website is almost certainly sold on visiting the general area, so concntrate on selling what you have to offer over what another place offers. If there are attractions within an easy reach then the availability of these attractions is what you should feature, not why your visitors should visit them, which could equally well apply to accommodation 50 miles away.

When creating a holiday flats website include photographs of any special features - roll-top baths, double showers, BBQ areas, four poster beds etc. Also mention all your special features in the text. But don't try to sell the general area to the visitor - that's probably already taken place.

Loan Calculator Site

Here's one of our own sites that we're still running, but as always if time allowed it could do with a lot of TLC!

Basically the original idea was to bring together loan calculators from everyone that we could find providing them. Where possible, these would be affiliate links, so that we earned a commission. Add to that Google Adsense and there's a nice little earner.

And it worked well, apart from there weren't many affiliate schemes with this simple tool. It's a shame because the reason behind the idea was the realisation that on other sites of our own, such links worked many times better than banner links.

As with many of our own sites, we've just not had the time to maintain it, giving priority to customer's websites instead. But I'm sure that over the next few months as we reduce the number of own sites that this one will be given the attention it so desperately needs. After all, it still gets some traffic for us and covers its keep.

Mobile Phone Insurance Website

This website was our first real venture into affiliate selling.

We signed up to to a mobile phone insurance white label website to enable us to make a bit of cash selling this insurance. There was a recommendation on the site that everyone creates their own micro site, or even just a single page, to help the sales. Basically, this way you link to your own site for the adverts, so that potential customers don't realise that every Google advert is pointing at the same merchant's affiliates....

It worked well, but we never had the courage to spend a lot on Adsense, nor the experience then to find good converting keywords. The site is still about and has now been extended to link to mobile phone affiliates, but as with many of our own sites, it needs some work as it's been left alone for too long.

Overall, the commissions in did exceed the Google payments out, but some months it was close cut due to the very low budget we were running with. If I had the time and patience to try again now I'd probably have a lot higher daily budget and loads more quality keywords, and maybe even make a good go of it.

Maybe it's on the list of work for when I've got a quiet hour or two...

Events Organisation Website

This was a nice little website advertising various team building events for the customer. He was buying these events from another company and putting together the full package.

This website showed pictures of some of the events and included various descriptions, contact forms etc. After a short while the customer also branched out into a security business, for which he again came back for a website. This security business has taken his full time so the events business was dropped.

Fashion Website

This was a site to advertise a designer making their own designer handbags and trying to sell them to shops. It was a simple, bright site that lasted a year or two, but then the owner decided that her brother should take over the site.

He's changed it since my original design and although I took the time and effort to create a really large sized logo, he's expanded a small one and it doesn't have the resolution. He's added a shopping area, which is nice, but the site has dropped from a good page rank to grey barred. Shame, it was a site that with a bit of TLC could have done well.

Traffic Selling Website

This website was our first to successfully use PayPal as a shopping media. It sold expired domain redirect traffic, which the buyer could choose where the traffic came from, quantity to buy and a category of website they were interested in. There was even a choice at the end of seeing the price in pounds or US dollars.

It worked well and get plenty of orders purely through search engine optimisation, but the quality of expired domain traffic, especially within the UK, is poor and although there were new customers coming on board, no repeat customers appeared. Having too much honour to keep flogging traffic that obviously wasn't doing much good, the idea was eventually dropped and all traffic routed to a popunder seller.

The other problem is that the traffic demand outstripped supply and it was taking ages to deliver the traffic. This lead to customers asking where their traffic was. Add to this some people ordering with fraudulent cards (why, we could stop the campaign mid flow) and the losses & wasted time this was creating and the site just wasn't worth the effort. Which was a shame as the orders that came in were good and created a good profit.

Recruitment Site - Part 2

This is the sister site to the ICD site I talked about last time. But as well as the static pages this one also holds the recruitment database.

On this site, the contractors can sign up, fill in some details and basically register as interested to receive work opportunities.

At the same time, companies requiring these skills can review basic details of the sort of people available and select some to go to interview. This short list are emailed and both parties can then start talking.

If the company finds a suitable candidate, the candidate pays a small fee whilst they are employed. There's a choice of fee structures for the candidates to choose from and because there are no hidden agency fees, it's an easy way to recruit temporary staff without it being overly expensive.

Contractor Recruitment Website

This site was part of a pair of websites built for the same customer, setting up a recruitment company of Compliance Directors. The twin site was far more involved, especially after the second phase, which I'll cover when I look at that site.

For this one, it was mainly about showing what was on offer and trying to get suitable candidates signed up (through the other site) and getting potential employers signed up. The idea was to bring these people together and let them do the work of an agency, thus being able to charge less than a standard agent as each party is taking on more of the work. For example, the potential employer selected a short list and emailed them through the system, but neither had contact details immediately.

Many people were fearful of upsetting agents by using this system, so although plenty of contractors signed up, the owner accidentally got into another line of business and pushed that instead. So this site was dropped and just he main site continues to this day.

Holiday Flat Website

When business was slow as we were taking off, we did concentrate on trying to get holiday accommodation websites up and running. We saw it as an area of the market that wasn't saturated, but where the websites were needed as people were likely to be booking on the internet.

As it happened, this customer was a result of general advertising, but with a bit of enthusiasm he soon became a customer.

He was advertising his apartment in Portsmouth, overlooking a harbour. The picture in the background of the site was actually taken in Liverpool's Albert Docks and it is from when the Grand Turk visited quite a few years ago (the ship used to film the early episodes of Hornblower). The Grand Turk is now in Whitby, but that is an aside from this site!

The site looked good, showed plenty of pictures and held a really nautical theme, but even with Google Adsense he wasn't able to generate the consistently booked apartment he had hoped for. He had set the apartment up as a really trendy, modern apartment with internet access and other benefits, but the income, of course, had to reflect this. To compete with neighbouring apartments he had to keep the rentals low but be booked all year round - a difficult job for any rental. I think in the end he decided to cut his loses and sold the apartment.

Holiday Accommodation Website

This is another holiday accommodation site that stayed with us until the owner's retirement earlier this year.

This website was for a small bed and breakfast in Suffolk. Advertising holidays in Suffolk, the website showed the accommodation and what the owner had to offer and dealt a lot with the nature aspect around her property.

We came into contact with this customer through mass mailings. One of the earliest mailings was received by her, just as she was contemplating a site. This gave us great hopes and we increased the mailings, never to get another positive response!

Insurance Website

This little website was a strange one. It wasn't for a local customer, but by fluke he was selling the insurance services of a company that is almost right next door to me - I can see their building from my desk.

He's an insurance broker and I built the website and he got down to the work of promoting it through his normal activities. But he knew that major changes were on the way in the financial services,literally only weeks away. When they came, he pulled the website, intending to move it to a different supplier. I spoke to him a few times and the move and redevelopment was always around the corner. We still host a holding page, nearly 3 years after the site was pulled. I'll speak to him tomorrow and find out what is going on.

Ebook Website

This site, still around, has slowly changed over the last 3 years.

It started off as a website for a financial advice ebook. It was promoted through adsense, but with changes to the financial sector, the owner was finding it difficult to maintain.

So the main emphasis of the website become on selling an ebook about playing Blues Piano. Some adsense and plenty of link building, with an article written to syndicate through a directory.

And in the near future, a new ebook will take it's place on the website. I just need to work out how to convert WPS to something I can read so that I can publish the site!

Accountants Website

Here's one that recently taught me a lesson. An early customer with a simple site. It looked OK - not fantastic, but it still looked good. Every year I contacted them with their hosting, asked them if they wanted any changes and every year the payment arrived by BACS. Safe as houses.

But I didn't pay them enough attention and they are moving their website to a local designer. No reason given, just contacted and told they are moving. Shame, but it's shown me that the personal touch when building a site must continue when the site is live. Those customers that I am in regular contact with are far more content and send me far more referrals.

So why didn't I do something simple like send them all a Christmas card??? Already got next year's planned.