The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I have been working for a couple of days on a face lift for the old Pennies for Wink site. I have just uploaded and tested the first phase of this face lift. There is a new look, I hope a bit more interesting, to the home page. I added several catalog pages and a directory to those pages, as well as left nav access to the pages. I redid my top and bottom navigation bars as well and added some pages that are long overdue.

I still need a ton of content for this site. I have an articles section that is completely unpopulated. I will write some articles and look for some good, relevant ones to reprint. I do see search engine traffic to some of the reprint articles on the Mixing Live Sound site. Original content is much to be preferred, but I am not always inspired to write. Of course, the site will need some promotion as well as content if there is to be any significant amount of traffic.

The domain name is not one that will be easy to promote. There needs to be some focus for a website and it is best if the domain name contains a keyword that is related to the site theme. I purchased this domain name before I became aware of how things work. I do have a few good domain names, more by accident than design. It would be nice if I could get this site to work well enough to pay its rent, at least. The education is worth something.

So, stop by the site and check out the changes. Leave me a comment or a suggestion as to the progress or direction that the site should go. There are comment boxes on the pages and there is a blog associated with the site. I have installed the KeywordLuv plug-in along with a do follow plug-in. There is a post about the update there. You could leave your comment on the main site or go to the blog to leave your comment.

I am adding a number of pages to the Pennies for Wink site. It had needed some love, and now it is getting it. I have been specking Amazon store pages for addition to the site. Of course catalog pages particularly enclosed in Iframes do not add any value to the site in the way of content. I will be adding a content page for every catalog page at the very least. I am also putting up a directory page with a small blurb about each of the catalog pages so that there will be a little text connecting to each of the pages until I get the articles in order.

As I have mentioned (somewhere), I installed the KeywordLuv and Do Follow plug-ins on the Pennies for Wink Save a Penny Blog. These plug-ins allow commenters on the blog to get a keyword backlink for their site. This encourages thoughtful comments on the blog posts. Of course that means that I need to make some posts worthy of a comment so that they have something on which to hang a quality comment.

I had thought that the update to Before You Buy a Website was complete, but in my travels this evening another topic was called to my attention. I had discussed navigation options in one of my articles but did not really discuss links and linking. I wrote an article and added another link in my website basics section this evening. I do expect to think of more topics but I would also like some suggestions.

If you check the page and think of a topic that should be discussed please leave a comment either in the BLOG or in the comment section on the main site. An advantage to leaving the comment in the blog on the site is that I have set that blog up for do follow links, so you can leave a comment and get a backlink to promote your own site. That blog is also set up with a plug-in called KeyWordLuv. If you leave a comment with the format of ‘name@your keyword’ in the appropriate box the display will read ‘name from keyword’ as the comment source.