Taking the Guesswork out of Color Schemes

Losing hours (literally, hours!) trying to find a perfect image, or decide on a color scheme for a website really sets me back. Something so simple shouldn’t be so frustrating.  A resource I found today, kuler.adobe.com, makes color selection infinitely easier!

By selecting a color scheme of 5 colors (that actually GO together) upfront for a website, and specifying which will be the background, hyperlink, heading font color, border color, etc., it made the process of laying out a Wordpress site using the Frugal template a snap.

Couple that with specifying 7 categories to develop content around in advance, and everything was pretty much ready to go in one afternoon… now it’s just matter of creating the content!

Stumbling over CSS and PHP

The first site I’m working on is another locator site, using the same software as thescrapbookstore.com, that  will help people find local farmers where they can buy fresh, organic, healthy, real food. They can type in their ZIP/Postal Code and it will show the farmers who sell direct, complete with driving directions.  

My reasoning for doing this site first is purely selfish - I watched the movie Food Inc.  over the holidays, and my trips to the grocery store are now accompanied by a newfound sense of trepidation. What am I really feeding my family?!?

I am using the Frugal WordPress template as the basis for it, because it lays everything out in nice easy boxes.  The locator script is a free script called phpGoogleStoreLocator.  My knowledge of CSS or php is painfully limited. I know enough to know something is possible, but I don’t know exactly what to type without googling something like CSS background color, and following the directions to the letter – for every little tiny thing I want to change.

While the Frugal template gives me a fairly clear menu to make my choices, the phpGoogleStoreLocator absolutely does not. It’s a very painful trial and error process to make the search pages and results pages look the same as the rest of the site.

Once I have it all “looking” seamless, I need to make notes on where exactly I changed things in the store locator’s CSS file, and where I added things into the php code of the pages itself, so if I pursue another locator site, it’ll be a much more efficient process – no more spending 53 minutes trying to figure out how to make all the various borders on the various divs look the same.

Talking Dirty with Google? Think Again!

Yesterday I parked all my yet-to-be-developed domains with Google AdSense. One of my favorites, talkingdirty.org, I envision being one of the more useful sites in the development queue.  Google apparently doesn’t share my vision, as their disapproval was swift and certain. They wanted no part of it; flat out rejection. The reason given centered around sexual, lewd, profane… and not a good fit with the Google brand, inappropriate, etc.

This on a day where my Google News Fast Flip featured a topless Playboy model … and they are calling my domain — which eventually will be a database of cleaning tips–  sexual and inappropriate?!? 

Note to Google: get your mind out of the gutter.

Action Step: Compile Action Steps

My action step for today is to compile all my action steps listed so far into one page.  Part of me says this is complete and total procrastination from actually doing an action step.

Another part of me says this relentless pursuit of logical order will pay off with huge dividends down the road; like measuring twice and cutting once.

Now that I’ve started working on a new website, instead of just trying to plan HOW I will go about working on new websites, I feel positive.  While I’m trying to determine what order to develop the domains in, I picked one that I personally thought would be useful, and forged ahead. 

I’ll be curious to see what the end of the week brings with the AdSense for Domains. It will be interesting to see which domain gets the most organic visits!

Establishing the Status of all Registered Domains

After only parking 24 domains with Google AdSense , I went through the status of each domain one by one, to account for the balance of the 52 domains.

• 6 domains have active sites. All could definitely use improvement, but I think that is a never-ending cycle.
• 1 site mirrors another site. Here it was the same domain name with two different extensions, .com and .ca
• 1 site redirects. I don’t know if it is better to mirror or redirect or if there is an actual difference between the two.
• 1 domains was set up to host using the free Google tools, and I can’t figure out how to change the CNAME record.
• 4 domains are .ca and registered with a Canadian registrar, and it is quite a cumbersome process to set them up to point to my hosting provider.
• 33 domains are parked with Google Adsense.
• 1 new site is in progress
• 5 domains are marked inactive, because they are at the absolute bottom of my list for getting developed in a full-fledged website.

24 Google AdSense for Domain Sites in Under 60 Minutes

After getting all but one of the registered, but yet unused domains parked with Google AdSense for Domains, I felt a small sense of accomplishment!  When I realized I only had 24 domains that hadn’t been taken beyond the registration stage, it left me wondering…. what exactly happened with the other 28?

There are a few sites that are active, a few that were active at one point but died off… and the whole part about “getting organized” took on another action step, as I didn’t have it quite noted anywhere what stage each domain was at in the development cycle. 

Action Step: Add a column showing the status of all 52 domains.

The Google AdSense for Domains also lets you customize the page, and add relative keywords. I did this for one domain, but I need to take a few hours and do it for each one; maybe not customize all the colors, but I think it would be important to list the relevant keywords for each domain.

Hopefully over the coming weeks it will help determine the order and amount of attention to give to each domain as it is developed.

Using Google AdSense for Domains in 10 steps

Setting up Google AdSense for domains required the following steps:

1. Most of the domains were registered with the company I have unlimited hosting with. The first step was to make all the registered domains “fully hosted” with the instructions to “Add WWW: make hollyjollychristmas.org redirect to www.hollyjollychristmas.org”
2. Now that I’ve added the “www” I have to remove the default hosting by clicking a little red x. This would make the DNS free to be customized with the AdSense for Domains code.
3. Next I click on the DNS link. I get the warning in big red letters that this area is for Advanced Users Only!  Heaven help us all, here I go.
4. I go to the “Add a Custom DNS Record” section.
5. In the Name section I type “www”
6. In the Type section I select ‘CNAME”
7. Value I enter pub-xxxxxxxxx.afd.ghs.google.com and then press “add record now”.
8. Now I have to go back to the domains section and tell it to “fully host this domain now”.
9. Switch back to Google AdSense and tell it to “Recheck Domain”. Then wait for the results. And wait. And wait. This is clearly not “instant”.
10. Success! Now that I know it works, I have to repeat the steps 48 more times.

Which Website Should be Worked on First?

After almost 5 hours of work, I have a largely complete spreadsheet organizing all of my domain details, folders and email rules set up in Outlook… and now I have to actually pick one domain and make something happen.

The challenge is, which domain should I complete first?  Establishing criteria, goals and desired outcomes is something that needs to be done. 

Loosely Defined Criteria for Site Development

1. It has to be useful.
2. Efficient:  user-generated content or content that is fairly static, but can be referred to again and again.
3. There are people who would actually visit the site.

Usefulness

For most of the domain names I’ve registered, I can recall the original intent and most of them I find useful, so I am assuming there may be a few other people in the world who would find it useful as well.  While not the most scientific approach, it’s a starting point.

Action Step: Assign a usefulness ranking from 1 to 5 – one being the highest, 5 being the lowest.

Efficient User-Generated or Static Content

There is absolutely no way I will be able to provide daily/weekly updates on 52 sites; I don’t have the desire or the time.  Having sites where the users generate the site content is the ideal first choice. Years ago I set up thescrapbookstore.com, a scrapbook store locator and I haven’t really touched it or done anything with it since.  Scrapbook stores enter their store locations, scrapbooking grannies search for those stores, and it all operates without taking any of my time. While it sorely needs something of a makeover update, it generates about $30 to $40 a month in Adsense revenue.  Do that 52 times, and it’s a tidy sum for a few days upfront investment that goes into creating the site.

Content for sites like hollyjollychristmas.org or theavrowarrow.com would be pretty static.  While there is always something new on the Christmas front, the reality is the lyrics for Jingle Bells are what they are. Much of the content wouldn’t change, but would be useful to someone year after year.  The Avro Arrow is really a niche site of historical information, targetted to Avro enthusiasts; not much new to share there, but it would be nice to have all of the information in one place.

Action Step: Establish a content ranking of (1) User generated; (2) Static; or (3) everything else, like a blog requiring updates.

Will People Visit the Site?

If I build it, will they come? Truthfully, I have no idea. I’m going to leave that in the hands of Google. 

Wondering how many people just type in the domain, I wanted to install Google Analytics on each one, but they all need to have a site established for that, which isn’t the case yet.

Instead, I’m turning to Google AdSense for domains.  I can park the domain with Google AdSense, and while the information won’t show up in the Google Analytics account, the Adsense setup will tell me how many people just stumbled upon the domain itself.  The logic being, the more hits a domain name gets without a site, the more hits it will get with a fully developed site.

Action Step: Set up every undeveloped domain with Google AdSense for Domains.

The only thing left to ponder, is how to assign this a numerical point value or weighting, so I can factor it in with the above two steps. The end result will be a fairly logical order to develop the domains, step by step.

52 Domains Checklist – Getting Organized

Having so many potential starting points makes it difficult to decide where to start even formulating a plan for making 52 productive websites in one year.  Logically, 52 websites in 52 weeks = 1 website a week…  and considering there are a handful up and running, I have a bit of cushion built into the timeline.  

After forgetting where some domains were registered, or being unable to remember the login password, I decided to start with getting organized. This is either a brilliant strategy or a thinly-veiled attempt at procrastination; after all, it is much easier to make a list of what you have to do as opposed to actually DOING what needs to be done.

Step 1 – Getting Organized

1. Make one master spreadsheet of all registered domains with the following columns:
   • Domain Name
   • Domain Name Registrar, along with admin email address on account, registrar site login and password info
   • Expiry Date
   • Website hosting provider, FTP login and password info
   • list of email addresses set up on the account with username and password info
   • Wordpress/admin logins and passwords for website
2. Create Folders to store files relating to each website
3. Set up email accounts in Outlook
   • set up folder for each domain
   • set up “mail rules” to automatically route incoming mail to the appropriate folder

Once I have these basics covered, I can move on to determining what domain to work on first.

First Things First (or knowing when to ask for help)

1. One thing I know – there is a heck of a whole lot I don’t know. 
2. One thing I’m good at – taking it step, by step, by step. Give me a checklist and I will rock your world.
3. Minimize effort and Maximize results.

So instead of spending 20 minutes guessing, searching, wondering and just ad-hocing the solution, I should know well enough to google the question, go to a support forum, FIND THE ANSWER instead of figuring it out, taking action, and then FINDING THE ANSWER, undoing what I did, and redoing it the right way.

I’m a big fan of WordPress.  They are like a big “easy” button in a complicated world of coding.  But there are thousands – upon thousands – of free templates to choose from to make it look just so.  Start going through them, one by one, and talk to me next year when you’ve found the “perfect” solution.  It can very easily turn into an endless process.

After wasting a day on this, my logical side kicked in. This is a blog, find out what professional bloggers do, and then do that. EASY.  So I google “professional blogger”.  Along comes problogger.net, and then after reading some article there,  johnchow.com.  Holy Hannah. Think of it as Christ vs. Antichrist.

Soooo, I look at this problogger fellow, thinking “ethics are good” and go with one of his advertisement links. I have no opposition to anyone making money online. It’s all fine with me. I get this Frugal template — it is again, one big easy button, according to the advertisement — so I happily pay the fee so as not to waste another day. I even sign up for an affiliate link, why the heck not?  Feeding my family doesn’t depend on this, if something comes my way in the end, big woo hoo.

It is very user friendly.  My husband’s site is done in a day. I so rock. This is EASY. I load it on this domain (productivity is the name of the game here, keep moving it forward!) and here we are.  It is a blank canvas that screams “POTENTIAL!” and they have done all the hard work, I just have to click and type. LOVE it!

Then it comes time to install Google Analytics. I don’t see the “Google Analytics Easy Button” anywhere on their back end. I look at every single possible field. Then I read the instructions for Google Analytics. Then I decide, they didn’t make this easy, I will just edit the code in the footer.php file.  So I did. Look at me go.

Then I thought, what a dumb thing not to make easy! I PAID for this! How dare they?!?

So I went to the Frugal forum (again, I did pay for this, I might as well make my voice heard) and I searched for Google Analytics.  And boom, there we go, the answer. Paste  the entire javascript code into the “Footer Script Field” on their Main/SEO window.  EASY.

Except it took me close to half an hour to complete a process that should have taken less than 3 minutes. Not too smart.

I work best with checklists. My best bet is to make a checklist of steps to do, right out of the gate so I go through the learning curve once, not 52 times!!

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