Sorry for the quiet time here lately. I am working my butt off on several projects and the blog had to suffer as a result. Last week I spent ~$400.00 on the developer pack for the WordPress Revolution Themes (not an affiliate link). I had looked at one specific theme first for a new site, but considering the price for one template (multi-use License) just made it clear to me to spend the extra money and go for the entire package.

I just finished my second site using the new templates and I am in love with these templates. Easy to modify, good documented, and astonishing looking in my opinion. I am not a gifted web designer and so this really helps to make a good impression with my websites. Here you can see the result where I just modified the colors a little bit, but when with an otherwise unmodified design.

Pregnancy Announcement

This is a website that I had build many years ago with just static pages. I am selling physical products (postcards) from this website and kept things simple. Lately traffic has been slowly decreasing a little bit and so I decided it is time for a re-design. Now it is running Wordpress and I can easily add content on the fly and trigger the search engines to come back with the build in blog ping feature of Wordpress. I am planning on doing 2-3 blog posts per month for the beginning. I still have to finish up some of the remaining 301 redirects to the new pages and make some minor adjustments here and there (sitemap, meta tags, etc.), but overall I think this is a great step into the right direction. I need to figure out if I can add some social networking pieces to the mix as well.  I also ordered one new postcard design which should arrive next week or so.

The new blog design also allows for better implementation of presenting additional affiliate offers. I will experiment with that a little bit to see what works and what doesn’t. Now that this is also a blog I can easily write product reviews and use those to drive more traffic to the site.

Anyway – let me know what you think the site is missing or what I can do better. I would be interested in that feedback and learn from it and share the results here.

By the way – I am using a product called “Mysimpleads” (Not an affiliate link) for the ad link and banner rotation. I think it is so much easier to use than OpenAds/OpenX/phpAdsNew. It takes only moments to setup a campaign and zones – including geo-targeting. I have been using it since it was in beta and it is fast and reliable + the developer is a really helpful guy.