Category Archives: Ideas

Common Error To Avoid When Designing a Website

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You want your site up now! You’re working hard and have spent hours on the layout and graphics. You publish your site and then start sending links to people. You start getting some traffic but something is bothering you. Something just doesn’t feel right.

Ask yourself this question: What do I want people to do when they view my website? 

That “something” that bothers you is a common mistake aspiring web-entrepreneurs often make. In the rush to get on the Net, the basic question hasn’t been asked. What do you want people to do on your site? Do you want them to click on pay per click links? Do you want them to purchase a product? Do you want them to sign-up for a mailing list? Do you want them to join your forum? Do you want them to make a donation?

Are you getting the idea now? Answering the “what action” question allows you to optimize your site toward that goal. Your site should have a call for action and be designed to make taking that action easy and unavoidable.

Go back to your site(s) and ask the question. What did you come up with? Is your site designed to make it easy for that to happen or is it buried underneath mounds of distraction? Avoiding this common error is a key to making your site a success.

Using Ecommerce Shopping Carts

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Here’s the story. I’ve got a ton of excellent aviation photography and none of it is being monetized. I decided that I could do some widescreen desktop wallpapers and make those available for purchase. I tested the concept out with three listings on eBay and someone purchased one of the papers (33%). I know that my sample size is WAY too low to be statistically significant but it was enough to encourage me developing the concept further.

(I should also note that I’ve received some criticism about the viability of the concept from DP forum members and some others. Essentially, many people are used to “free” wallpapers and don’t think there will be a market for what I’m trying to do. The point is noted and if the concept does bust, I have nobody to blame but myself…)

Now I had to decide how I was going to sell these items on a website. I purchased a domain name (to be disclosed later) and starting wrestling over exactly “how” I was going to do this. My initial thoughts were:

  1. Static HTML site with paypal cart
  2. Packaged PHP site like http://www.ktools.net/photostore/
  3. Open source ecommerce site

The static HTML site seemed easy enough but it didn’t offer me much in the way of out of the box functionality. I quickly abandoned that idea. The packaged PHP site seemed like a winner, but I balked at the price. This left me with exploring ecommerce sites.

My hosting package has a few shopping carts ready for install via fantastico so I started researching. I finally decided on Zen Cart to power my site. Because my ISP didn’t have the latest version, I had to install it manually. Let me warn you now that you need to have a certain level of technical savvy before trying that.

I got it up and running in about an hour. I hated the green template it uses so I’ve spent a number of hours modifying the site to my tastes. You get a ton of admin features on a separate admin panel. One nice thing is that Zen Cart is designed to let you override the template or PHP files. You can make a separate folder for your mods so that you won’t lose everything when you need to upgrade to the next version. Great thinking on their part.

It’s been a week so far of non-stop effort to get the site up. I would say that it’s been 60% reading forums and 40% working PHP and CSS. It’s kinda like building a plastic model of a B-17. Lots of time, effort, and attention to detail.

In future blogs, I’ll discuss going live and promotions.

Making Money Blogging

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So can you make money from blogging with investing little money yourself? One guy is doing it using blogger. Here’s the formula:

1. Research a niche term
2. Start a “blogger” blog (free)
3. Post articles relating to this niche term
4. Slap some adsense on the page or other affiliate links

Sounds “easy” enough eh?

Some concerns raised are:
1. Blogger “could” delete your blog on a whim (unlikely but possible).
2. You’re writing on topics you don’t “care” about and thus it’s just a “job”.

Philosophically, each person has to decide what’s their end goal. If it’s job “satisfaction” then yes, you might not want to create multiple blogs on topics you don’t care about. For me, if you are successful at it, you could outsource the blog writing for a minimal amount of cash. People are writing on topics for 0.02 to 0.03 cents a word on Digital Point. You could turn this into a blogging empire.