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The site vs blog mix

I’m trying to come up with a design and strategy for a new blog, which will complement an existing site. Well it will be a new domain / site, but I know what the main content of the site will be.

In my case a shopping site for jewellery.

So why have a blog?

Well my wife would like to talk about how she has made the jewellery. While looking at twitter I realised that customers would find this interesting.  Also, it would provide some interesting content from an SEO point of view.

Now, we had thought about getting our own family personal site and using a blog to discuss the jewellery and personal topics as well as host family photos. But I wanted us to get some topics written and some firm ideas before we proceeded.

So to a certain extent the personal site idea seems to have lost steam.

Then I thought, how much of the content from the personal site idea, could we include in the shop blog?

I mean, would having family photos and some personal topics on a shop site look unprofessional OR would it add to the reputation / likeability of the jewellery artist?

Comments?

by JM

2009 04 15 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (4) Permalink

Yet another thought on missing images

This is another update on my missing image investigations on softwarelode. What I’ve now realised is that all my PHP code for checking for missing images is OK when loading a specific page. The PHP runs, checks if an image is present then either shows or not the screenshot hyperlinks from the program details pages. This seems to run OK and I only present a screenshot page for a program on my site when there really is an image to show.

The further problem I’ve thought of though is that my sitemaps are automatically generated by PHP and when I generate the sitemap, I don’t run the missing image checks. This means I end up including screenshot URLs in the sitemap that don’t exist. I wonder whether this confuses the Google Webmaster tool and keeps the errors alive in Google’s diagnostic interface months after the URLs were removed from my site.

The conclusion I’m coming to now is that the best I can do is check the screenshot URLs at the point of submission – or on a PAD poll – and update the info I store for the PAD to reflect whether there really is a screenshot. I could then remove the checks when a page is loaded and speed things up a bit.

2009 04 08 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (1) Permalink

What to do with my other shop with it bad url, or is it?

What to do with http://www.mcls4u.com/shop …

This shop is much older that kids math store, I origally had maths products in it, it had products but remained pretty much uncared for from 2006 until last year.

I then moved the maths products to kms and put jewellery products in it instead.

Since then, I’ve done pretty much the same things to both sites. I even got the content re-written by someone and had keywords mentioned from other pages and internal links to those pages. Which I did on kms also.

I’ve also done pad programs for both sites.

In fact the PR on both sites has remained in sync.

However, I do get a trickle sales on the kms maths site, but none on mcsl4u.

The only thing I can think of is that, mcls4u shop isn’t as nice a domain name as kidsmathstore. Also having the keywords in the domain name.

Since the site isn’t selling, I’m a little reluctant to buy a good domain name and spend time moving the site over. I’ve also got all those inbound links which will be wrong.

Any ideas what I should do?

by JM

2009 04 08 Dipsy Search Engine Optimisation Comments (10) Permalink

Are old program listings worth keeping?

Over at softwarelode I’ve got a number of old listings dating back to 2005, 6 or 7. Are these listings worth keeping? You could say that if it’s still a live program then keep it listed but would the quality of the site be improved by removing listings that may well be abandoned by the author? I’ve noticed that older listings often don’t have icons etc. so perhaps if a listing is older than 2 years and doesn’t have an icon, I could think about deleting it.

Any thoughts?

2009 04 07 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (2) Permalink

K Program Feedback 2

After posting my earlier K Program Feedback post I had deliberately not mentioned the program to my kids to see if they asked to use it again. Well, this Sunday, the 5-year old spontaneously asked if he could “do the mask program” again. I burned the program onto a CD and installed it onto a Windows XP machine. He chuckled as soon as he saw the clown’s face appear. I got him up and running (past the nag dialogs about checking for updates online etc.) and left him to play quite happily for half an hour.

I thought I’d let you know since he must have like it a fari bit to remember the program four weeks later.

2009 04 06 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (1) Permalink

Software marketing

I know this may seem stupid, but I’ve not serious thought of SEO as a marketing approach, I know it is, but you don’t kind of think of it that way. To me its more like making sure your HTML is valid.

When you think of SEO as one of the marketing  tools in your arsenal, you start to consider that its only one tool that you should be using. Like many programmers who have discovered you can’t just upload your software and expect it to sell, I’ve read and watched others follow a great range of marketing strategies. Many of which I have tried. Then I’ve had no sales from it and thought, ah that doesn’t work and moved on.

Obviously you have to use lots of different marketing techniques as a part of your marketing strategy.

I’ve been reading about software marketing techniques a bit recently and discussed them in a few different arenas. It seems to me now that you have to be realistic about your marketing, you can’t get sales from one method alone, one must complement another.

The idea of providing a free version of your software is bad one, on face value. For the reasons we’ve discussed recently. However, providing something for free, is a great way to get traffic, however there must be some value in your freebie.

I know mike has done this, I think part of these strategies has to be to provide something like a free software product, which will be on the homepage of our main products. Perhaps an easy thing to do, is to scoop out some of the functionality from our main programs and add some extra features, maybe a viewer etc.

I guess the obvious trap you fall into with this idea, is that you’ve have to optimize your page for the free product to gain the most from it and this would detract from your main product. So I guess your free product must complement your main product in a way which will still encourages buyers.

This week Blue has been talking about his Adwords, this must be another tool in our arsenal, however like Blue has done, our page need to be optimized and the keywords need to be selling keywords.

Another marketing tool I plan to use, is engaging the customer, with a new timed autoresponding setup.

I haven’t had much success with newsletter or press releases in the past, but as I was saying, I expected these would directly lead to sales, which isn’t the aim. The aim is to get noticed by editors and they give you good right up, which will lead to traffic and sales.

I think we should discuss more strategies and figure out the ultimate goal and plan our full strategry.

Personally, I need to plan out my strategy with as much effort and thought as I have my recent program updates plan. I guess it needs to be something which adapts and changes, again something I’d like to discuss.

by JM

2009 04 01 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (1) Permalink

Missing Images – the real reasons

In a post earlier this week I asked if there was a reliable PHP function to check if an image exists. In a comment on the post I showed the code I currently use. After a bit more investigation I think my code pretty much works OK but that all Google Webmaster errors that were suddenly appearing were for different reasons altogether. It turns out that there are really two errors being flagged up …

The first are genuine missing images. However, these errors are very old – as early as July 2008 in some cases – and pre-date when I actually added the missing image PHP function into my website’s code. Google Webmasters is just being very slow for some reason in flagging up the errors.

The second error is that in some PAD files, the JPGs or GIF URLs corresponding to the package screenshots actually show web pages. Whether these are coming up due to 404 errors I’m not sure.

So the remedy for me is simply to wait for Google to realise that there aren’t any links to missing images any more. Also, I’m going through the errors and deleting the listings that have package screenshots bringing up web pages. I’m then adding the URLs for offending PAD files to my blacklist.

I’m quite glad I found the true causes of the errors since now I don’t have to risk adding more code and slowing down my page load times.

2009 03 31 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (1) Permalink

Search Engine traffic on the way back at last

A couple of months ago on this blog I wondered whether there was such a thing as an Adsense penalty. Over at my software downloads site, traffic had been building up nicely and I was getting over 2000 page views a day. I was starting to make a nice bit of Adsense income and looking at making 2 or 3 hundred dollars a month. Then it all went inexplicably wrong and over the next few weeks traffic shrank down and down to 4 or 500 page views a day. At this level, it means that the only traffic I was getting was authors submitting PAD files.

However, I’ve been doing some link-building since the traffic disappeared and gained a load of one-way links from other download sites, partly by trading links from other sites. For a while there seemed to be no effect and traffic kept on falling. However, this week and last things are beginning to look good again and I’m now back up to 1600 page views a day. I’ve even picked up sitelinks for the term “softwarelode”.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that the increase in traffic will stick. All the links I’ve built should help all our sites including SoftTester. I’ve noticed today that SoftTester is at #29 on Google for the term “free software downloads” which is the highest I’ve ever seen it placed.

2009 03 31 MikeL Search Engine Optimisation Comments (1) Permalink

Wireless Networks and Occasionally Connected Applications

I’ve been doing some research and thinking about database systems and the future direction I want for my applications.

I’ve been thinking about my home network which is wireless-based and how the network has a habit of dropping in and out. A lot of bigger companies have a rock-solid wired network but I bet that these days a number of smaller or home-based outfits have temperamental networks like mine.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about for the far-off future is web integration. I was approached to implement a web/ desktop application, i.e. use my app. as a frontend for a web-based DB. The idea was that a company would do work for clients but the clients would be able to remotely access the data. A browser-based interface wasn’t being called for: The clients would need to be able to work in a totally disconnected state. If the client updated the data locally, the data would need to be resynched centrally, so the synchronisation worked in both directions.

Doing some research on Google, I came across the concept of OCAs (Occasionally Connected Applications). One of the ideas behind OCAs is that the user works with a central DB server but if the connection to the server drops out, or is simply unavailable because the user is out and about in their car for example, data is stored locally on their PC. Any data stored locally on the user’s PC is then synced automatically with the central DB when the connection is next available. All this happens (as far as practically possible), without any “connection lost” errors popping up to annoy the user.

The concept of OCAs seemed very complicated BUT when I think how my home network is unreliable and my desire to enable web-working, I wonder whether any server-based setup should incorporate synchronisation and offline working aspects from day one, i.e. whether the concept of OCAs killed two birds with one stone.

Any experience or thoughts on this kind of application design?

2009 03 30 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (4) Permalink

In PHP is there a reliable way to determine if a remote file exists?

On softwarelode, I coded up the PHP to detect if a program screenshot exists at the URL given in the PAD file. The problem is that sometimes the code works and sometimes it doesn’t. Google Webmasters likes to delay giving me errors but in the last few weeks it’s started complaining of about 100 cases where I give the URLs for the softwarelode screenshot pages but the screenshots don’t exist.

What code, if any, do you use on SoftTester?

2009 03 30 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (17) Permalink