Tableless Web Design

Just out of curiosity, has anyone read the book by Rachel Andrew and Daniel Shafer entitled HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS? I’m tempted to take a look at it as I’m always looking for new CSS resources.

Tags: css, html, web design

Split Testing Google Adwords

I just stumbled across a method of testing your Google Adwords ads that I’d never thought of. It’s called split testing and its a simple, yet powerful method to test your ads.

The idea is to create two ads that utilize the same keyword. Each ad has its own unique title and description. Place the ads with the same bid price. Google will alternate the ads accordingly for you. Run each campaign for 24 hours. The ad with the higher CTR is the better ad. Now repeat that whole process with a new ad and the winning ad from the previous split test.

Keep competing with yourself to create better and better ads. This little activity will help your click through rate grow while also letting you lower your bid price.

When doing a split test, you need to make sure that you select only the search network and NOT the content network because the content network, Adsense, will skew your results slightly. If you are targeting Adsense specifically, create a separate split test.

Tags: google, adsense, adwords, advertising, split test, ctr

Building a Strong Web Based Community

What does it take to build an online community these days? Not much. With packages like Drupal and phpBB, the means to run a community oriented website are literallly just a few clicks away. But what are the factors involved in making a community site successful?
Continue reading »

Choosing a Good Domain Name

I own quite a few domain names, as many web entrepreneurs do. When choosing a domain name, one must take extra care to look at the domain name in question from another’s point of view. I ran across a list of the 10 unintentionally worst domains while browsing digg. You’ll laugh yourself sick. Needless to say, I’ve used a few of these site on multiple occasions and never thought twice about the domain name.

10 unintentionally worst domains from digg

Yaro is Smart

Just a quicky today. Don’t worry, we can cuddle afterward and I’ll even call you tomorrow. There I go digressing again.

Over at Entrepreneur’s Journey, Yaro has a quote up that kinda hit home today. That quote is:

“When you own your own business you may not make any real money until you sell it.”

As both of you know, I recently started a small IT Consulting Company here in Idaho. Although I have begun to make ends meet (meat?), I have yet to see any real advantage over the normal nine to five, except the hours, of course.

So maybe I’ll hang on to this little company of mine and sell it to Bill Gates for a small profit!

If you don’t already read Entrepreneur’s Journey, well….then start.

Affiliate Programs are Cool

Being a wannabe web entrepreneur, I’m always on the look out for new ways to monetize my websites. One of the most popular ways to monetize websites these days is by using Google Adsense, Google’s PPC text ad program (see far right column). To be honest though, I’m not a big fan of the program. It seems to me that it is far too easy to fraudulently click on ads to make money. Plus it doesn’t seem like a great deal for advertisers as they are paying just for traffic to their site and not for legitimate sales opportunities. So I’ve been testing other affiliate programs lately. Continue reading »

PHP and Paypal

I consider myself fairly versed in the programming language PHP. I prefer it over M$ languages because its free and open source, also because the majority of shared web hosting servers available are linux based. PHP and Linux play very nice together. Although you can run PHP on Windows-based servers.

When developing a new site, if I need a php script that I don’t already have in my library, I try to find a free one online that requires minimal alteration to suit my needs. I find this cuts my development time considerably. As it stands, there is an abundance of free php scripts available for just about anything one could possibly need. Most of them are fairly easy to understand and alter to your liking. This is not the case with paypal IPN scripts.

I’ve been looking for a PHP Paypal IPN script for a very long time. There are many of them out there, but until yesterday I couldn’t find one that worked first time AND didn’t require server alteration to run. Then I found Paypal Web Services over at Sourceforge. Paypal Web Services is a collection of paypal scripts that cover all your paypal payment needs. After configuring the config.inc.php file, I was accepting Paypal payments in less than 20 minutes. This beats trying to read Paypal’s 122 page PDF explaining how Paypal payments work. Yes, I’m not linking to the PDF for spite!

Tags: php, paypal, programming, IPN, free scripts

Link Love #1

I’m too lazy busy to come up with any legitimate content right now. So I’ve decided to start a mini series called ‘Link Love’ where I will share with you some interesting posts I ran across via my overstuffed RSS reader.

• Web Knowledge Levels
• How quickly after starting a blog should I put ads on it?
• Free Blogger Templates
• Free Blog Poll Tools

Tags: free, links