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.