Entries Tagged 'Site Case Study' ↓

So should we develop the site from scratch or use a CMS?  Quite frankly it has been an easy question to answer this time round.  The time it has taken to develop the backend of a new website and design the layout previously has been too time consuming.  Although I can script ok in PHP and am familiar with Mysql I’m not the fastest nor am I any cop at design to be honest so it has been an easy option to decide to use a CMS (Content Management System), but which one? Open Source CMS is worth a look for ideas.

There are many CMS open source scripts available, Joomla and Drupal being quite popular but one that I have been paying some serious attention to is Modx which I think is brilliant, if you haven’t heard of this CMS before visit their website, it is well worth considering it for a future project.  Although I think Modx is brilliant, I have actually chosen to use Wordpress.  But thats a Blogging tool I hear you cry, yes that’s true but with the use of certain plugins and a good theme Wordpress works very well as a CMS and many affiliates have utilised it for this very purpose, ukoffer springing first to mind as an example.

One of the other reasons that I have chosen Wordpress is a theme (or selection of themes) that I stumbled upon by Brian Gardner at revolutiontheme The magazine theme was exactly the kind of layout I was looking for so what would be the point in spending valuable time designing and developing a theme from scratch when one is already available and easily customisable if you know a little about css, html and php?

So we now have a home for the new website and a place to host it. Bargain

A lot of people don’t pay as much attention to their domain name as they probably should. People will make a judgement regarding your website before they even visit it, the domain name or URL (Universal Resource Locator) can attract or deter visitors so it is well worth spending time choosing it, after all it is the first thing that the search engines come across when they crawl.

Often businesses will choose to include their name in the URL, such as www.confused.com but without the huge advertising budget would it be easy to work out what this site does without visiting it?

Some sites, especially those that specialise in a certain area will use those keywords in their chosen domain name, this is exactly what we will be doing with our guide to the Norfolk Broads website. Quite a while ago we secured www.norfolkbroadsguide.co.uk and this is the domain name that we will be developing the new site on. Yes it is slightly longer than we would have probably liked but it does contain important keywords and I like to think it is also easy to understand what the site will have to offer even before people visit it, It should also be easy to remember so branding should not be an issue.

I used www.123-reg.co.uk to search for and purchase the domain, another site that may be of interest when searching for a domain name is www.nameboy.com this allows you search for a domain using keywords that you would like to be included in the URL.

Now that we have chosen the domain name we need to decide if we are going to code the site from scratch or use a CMS (Content Management System). We’ll cover that in a future post.

Part of the reason for starting this blog was that I thought it would be fun to outline the steps that I’m going to take to develop an idea I have been pondering over for the last few months into a fully functional and hopefully highly successful website.

I have been dabbling about with affiliate marketing for the last couple of years and feel I now have a solid understanding of what is needed to make an affiliate site work, basically hard work, some more hard work and you’ve guessed it, great content (I’m sure you’ve heard the well coined phrase, content is king).

The one piece of advice I would offer to new comers to affiliate marketing is the same piece of advice that was offered to myself and almost every other new comer, base your site on something you are interested in and therefore should have a good understanding and knowledge of. Do not attempt to make the next big price comparison or general shopping site, it’s not going to happen.

So whats this idea you’ve been working on Andy? Well, I am lucky enough to live in the Norfolk Broads so I will be developing a guide to the area including information on accommodation, fishing, holidays, boating and anything else that would be of interest to both locals and holiday makers alike. Yes there is already a couple of sites doing this already (a bit of healthy competition never hurt) so the main goal will be to out perform these established websites in the organic search engine rankings by writing great optimised content.

I’ll leave it there for now, tomorrow we’ll look at choosing a domain name (URL).

Affiliate marketing forum you may be interested in a4uforum