Just wanted to make a post thanking all of my visitors. I know there are many of you who check this site everyday. Believe me, I follow my stats! I’ve been doing web marketing for the past 3-4 years so I like to think that I know my stuff when it comes to attracting visitors. The truth is, it’s all about producing great content (still working on this part ) and giving you guys a reason to come back.

With that said, I would deeply appreciate it if you guys would link to my blog in your forum signatures! I’m not looking to make bank off this site; – just want my effort to be noticed.

That is all.

Happy Easter and stay tuned for some mini features!

I have always had a hard time maintaining this blog. I have moved servers countless times and not bothered to retain the old archived posts. I just end up starting with a fresh install of wordpress and I’m off again. I think the reason why I haven’t kept the old posts (even though many of them were extremely informative), was because I never bothered monetizing this blog. I have never had ads on here. I think that if I could see a visible stream of money coming in (basically passive income), then I’d be motivated to continue posting useful things. Even if it’s only a few dollars a day, that’s all the proof I need that the time I spend is worth it. Unfortunately, when I am working online, I only see things in $. That’s more gas for my car, more food for my belly, and more money in the bank.

blogaboutyourblog.com has a post up about his blog making $1200 in 10 months of inactivity. This is more than four times the amount that he made in his five months of active blogging. I assume the income was all from adsense, and with his poor ad placement, and only 120 uniques/day, these numbers are very surprising.

I am going to implement adsense sometime soon.

Style Ignite has a great article on 8 tips to remember before designing your next site.

I feel that the most important thing before setting out to build/design a website is to know your niche. It’s very likely that someone else has thought of the same idea before you and has it published on the net already. In fact, it’s highly likely that your niche is polluted with competition. This does not mean that you cannot produce some sort of success. (Just take a look at how many web proxies are out there.) “Knowing your niche” means that you know who the big time players are, the audience they go after, and why they are doing so well.

My CTO mentioned that it seems like there are 75 “web 2.0″ templates out there and people just change the colors and text around for each new site. Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t “designers” harbor their creativity and just make something nice. The rise of flamboyant colors, images, and white space is great for many sites that target the new generation. But how many 30+ people like it? 40+? Have you ever asked someone other than your 18 year old web design buddies? If you take a look at BaseCamp and CentralDesktop’s websites. It’s clear which is more of a simple web 2.0 application, and which is more of an enterprise level application. If you are building a website that targets grandmas who want to organize photos *ahem*, don’t use bright colors. You are just hurting their eyes. Their eyes are tired. They just want to lay down and drink tea and eat the scrumptious crumpets that they baked in the morning.

The next point, is noticing what your competition is doing. Look at their landing pages and product tours. They may not be the very best executions, but their success *might* be attributed to how well their campaigns are converting.

Search Google for some news, comments, reviews, etc on your competition. See what their users are saying. Learn from their mistakes. Find out why people aren’t using their services and figure out how you can capture those users.

Here is a good article titled, Stealing Business Away from your Competition.

Thanks to Jordan, I have a new theme! I think that the minimalist feel works best on blogs so that the focus is on the content or any images in the post.

Visit Sour Customs for any web design work. He does more than proxy themes too, just contact him.

So far I have only noticed one problem. On a post page, the logo image does not appear so you can’t get back to the home page.

Edit: I just remembered that tags aren’t displayed anywhere. Tags are vital for SEO on a blog.

Edit 2: Michael suggested that I add 1.5em line-height. Done.

I need a new blog theme. This one is too standard. Something extremely simply that puts heavy focus on content would be great. I wish upon a star, that I’ll one day be a great designer.