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.