Things Are Looking Up Again

Finally got to speak with our linking strategist about plans for the freshare site. I told him that the linking strategy was going slowly - a lot of tedious work with very few solid results. I wanted to move on to the publicity part of the plan.

We discussed that strategy and what was needed. Then Eric made the best suggestion yet. One that made the wait worthwhile and the consulting fees money well spent. He suggested we put a very specific search engine on our site. One that only features the best bloggers and citizen journalists in our region. Such a search engine would greatly simplify things for visitors who only want information from local bloggers and it would help gel our relationship with those bloggers. We put the engine in the very next day.

This weekend, I'll work on the site announcement for Eric to send out to his contacts. After that, I'm hoping we'll see a readership begin to emerge.

Another Tough Week

Our expert in linking and publicity strategy has pretty much ignored my emails requesting the final conversation and the publicity package I've already paid for. Today I sent out an email reminding him I already paid him (two months ago) and expect an immediate reply. I got one. We are slated to finish up tomorrow. We'll see.

I've also been looking into affiliate programs to see if I can find some webmasters who are interested in selling ads on our employment and classifieds sites. I tried HydraMedia and, after talking to a rep, the program sounded solid. All that was left was for me to sign a credit / financial agreement and an insertion order.

Good thing I read through them first. Hydra wants to check credit anytime (presumably even if we decide to dissolve our business relationship) and they want to use only their figures in determining affiliate payment with no room for discussion if we see an error.

I don't mind a credit check, but unlimited ones? Accessing credit reports can have a negative impact on credit scores. Would you give a stranger that kind of freedom? Probably not. Neither would I.

Using Hydra's numbers for calculating affiliate payment does make sense. But give up my right to challenge those numbers? Never.

I presented these concerns to my rep. So far, she has not replied.

Links

We've spent the last week and a half or so emailing hundreds of web site administrators requesting they link to freshare. While we were extremely busy, productive emails have been hard to come by. We picked up about half a dozen or so links, some unfulfilled promises of links and a lot of unanswered emails.

It's not like we spammed or shotgunned our efforts. We hired an individual who is known in the industry as a links expert. The web administrators we chose were well thought out and were already linking to some of our competitors.

It's tough to keep focused on the task when there is so little success to celebrate. This week, we are going to try to fire up the publicity portion of our campaign. We think that generating a buzz will not only help promote the site, but we will also see an increase in the number of inbound links we receive.

Writing Code

For me, writing the code behind the website was a slow, sometimes painstaking process. I knew a bit of HTML, but precious little about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Expression Engine, or EE (the software I chose to power our content management system).

The HTML part was not too bad. Fairly straightforward and not to cumbersome to work with. Mostly, I used HTML to divide up the page, create links, make lists and fairly mundane things.

The real workhorses behind the site are the CSS, which I'll talk about tomorrow, and EE. They perform all the real work.

I read anything I could find, searched the Internet and hung out at forums trying to pick up whatever I could about working with EE. Luckily, someone I hired to put together that piece of the site had laid out enough code that I could follow the logic and improve on it. The gentleman I hired abandoned the project without warning or explanation about halfway through, so I was forced to pick up the pieces from there. Looking back now, he did me a favor because it forced me to learn the program.

Just so you know, Expression Engine is powerful yet inexpensive content management software. The trade off is, the only tech support you get is via their forums, wikis, knowledge base and documentation. But, let me tell you, those folks are fantastic to work with. I posed a lot of questions on the forums and got the help I needed quickly. Day or night. If you are considering content management software, I would highly recommend Expression Engine.

Back to Blogging

Well, it's been quite some time since I last blogged here. But now that the website makeover is complete, I have a little more time to write English instead of xhtml and CSS code. Over the next several days I'll be recounting the process we've gone through in our website transformation.

For example, while I was away from the blog I revised the "YourPanorama" web site twice. The last revision was a complete makeover. Even the name has been changed - to freshare. We pronounce it "fresh air" but you could also say "free share" as some people do because that's accurate, too. It's a citizen journalism site where visitors can share news, opinions and photos in a free exchange of information.

Freshare just seemed more like us. YourPanorama was fine but it was too long and not as descriptive of our project. Luckily, we had not branded YourPanorama to any great extent so we were early enough on in the process to make the switch.

Tomorrow, I'll talk a bit about the code behind the site and some of the resources that I found helpful.