I’ve been thinking for a while about getting a new phone so I can check out all the mobile apps available. But after posting about it on Facebook, I realise the choice is staggering.

Now I really don’t need an iPhone as all I would use it for are the mobile apps. And I’m a big google fan. So I’ve decided to wait until a cool new phone using the Android platform becomes available and more apps get launched for it.

In the meantime, I’ve opted for a dongle with 3 network – bargain at £90 for 12 months “unlimited” access. Not exactly mobile apps but mobile web using my laptop . Haven’t tried it out yet – might take it to starbucks one day soon and give it a whirl.

This week has been amazing for London for Free. The number of visitors in the past month has now exceeded 21,000 and adsense revenue for Feb has jumped 30% on January.  And we do absolutely zero paid advertising.

The site is now ranking top of results for a number of google searches around “London”, so that would help. It even beats commercial sites about London. e.g. for “London walks” I rank number 1, above “walks.com” and others.

So I’ve been thinking of ways of boosting the site’s numbers even more and I’ve now set up a twitter account for London for Free, where I will try to post daily info and links to free stuff. Its also another way of learning more about how twitter can be used for business purposes.

This week I also discovered an excellent plug-in for Outlook called xobni. Can’t rave enough about it – it brings all your LinkedIn and Facebook contacts and statuses into the outlook client so you can see info about people as you read emails from them. It also enables you to integrate hotmail and gmail accounts so you can check them all from outlook. An excellent plug-in.

Lastly, I’ve bought two books recently which look very interesting.

Click and Grown up Digital.

I’ll post reviews of them once I’ve read them.

In those four months its had over 70,000 visits and over 335,000 page views: comparable figures for the same period last year were 41,000 visits and 156,000 page views. (Thanks to Google Analytics for making all this metrics stuff available to webmasters for free.)

In addition, since April the site has generated over US$500 in Ad Sense pocket money – hardly enough to live on, but not bad given I pay not a cent to advertise it.

Money for nothing, as it were. Imagine the results after I start to do a deeper analysis of the stats and get tweeking things

Amazing!

So I thought I’d have a look at the visitor stats so far.

Since 24th April when the site was relaunched, it has had over 43,000 visitors and 208,000 page views, with average visitor time on the site being around 4 minutes.

The number of click throughs to google adverts which have led to earnings is just over 1,100.

Which looks pathetic at first, but doing the calculation of click throughs to visitors, that gives me a conversion rate of 2.6% which probably isn’t actually that bad as a starting point.

And now that the site has had some time to settle down, it gives me a simple benchmark to use to see whether I’m achieving my aims for it or not. And to start looking at trends.

My goal for the site was to provide a place that people could come to for free stuff about London, have a look around and then click through to advertiser sites.

Seems I’m getting people to the site, giving them just enough to look at – but I need to do more to get them to leave via click throughs. Time for a bit of research about google adsense optimising, I think.

So finally today, I started creating the first mobile version of the site.

Now the good thing I discovered is that my current site is already accessible via mobile. I’ve checked it on a blackberry and also on my new phone, and it doesn’t look too bad. But it’s not optimised for mobile use.

After all, there’s a load of stuff on there that you probably wouldn’t want to try and read on your mobile. Or can’t view at all even if you did want to – e.g. the YouTube video clip on the home page.

So I did a bit of thinking about the sort of content on london for free that someone on the move might want to see. And I figure that’s basically directions and info for the most popular walks and bus tour, and links showing the locations of landmarks on them. Content they can refer to while they are actually doing the walks or tour.

Then I needed to rethink the current page layouts from a mobile angle. The average mobile screen size is – doh – loads smaller, and anyone who’s tried to navigate around a website on a mobile knows its not easy, so I knew I needed to create narrow content and lots of internal site links that are easy to get to.

And, of course, I had to consider page weight. No one probably gets the promised 3G speeds touted by mobile phone companies, so I needed to provide lots of pages with tiny bits of content, making them quick to download.

Putting it altogether, it meant identifying the most popular walks (via google analytics), chopping their content up into pieces, embedding style info within the xhtml pages (rather than using separate css files), shrinking the image sizes and including lots of nav links.

But using the same London for Free logo to try and retain the relationship with the main site in case anyone wanted to check out the full site on their computer.

Finally, like any good web site, it had to be accessible – so the code had to be totally validated.

Here’s my first attempt. I based it on the templates provided on dev.mobi.

Though the normal W3C Validator works for validating mobile sites, there is a much better alternative called readi.mobi.

It not only validates your mobile pages but it also gives you info like the speed of download to an average mobile, the cost of download in various countries, and crucially screenshots of what the page looks like in different mobile phones. For example, here’s the info they gave me for my mobile index page.

I’ve still got a way to go to get the site fully up and running for mobile – lots of content to modify, for starters. But at least I now know what I need to do.

Recently I had started to receive spam emails through the web forms dotted around the new site. Thinking back with horror to the time a few years ago when I was receiving thousands of spam messages a day, I knew I had to do something to stop them.

Then I recalled reading about Captcha apps – they generate those images with either words, numbers or letters in them that you sometimes see on the web say when registering for a site, aimed at stopping spambots in their tracks.

A quick search showed loads of apps that required payment. Then I found a free app called Securimage Captcha. And it was a dream to install. Just a few lines of code in each page and formscript.

Hopefully no more spammers for the moment, at least.

Though site traffic is slightly down from the old version of the site (when comparing April to May) the number of pages visited per user is far higher.

Less visitors but deeper visits – I’m happy with that. The lower number of visitors overall could be to do with easter being early this year, and I guess a true traffic comparison won’t be possible for 11 months or so.

And the earnings from google ads have shot up enormously. The figures for the past 28 days since the new site was launched have already well exceeded the earnings from the old site for all of 2008 (Jan 1 to April 23). I think most of this increase is due to the automated optimising by google of the adwords displayed, and by displaying more adwords throughout the site.

Time to take stock and think about how to improve these trends even more.

Something that links these two factors together are google keywords. Most of my traffic comes via the google search engine – and my google adsense earnings are generated by people clicking on adverts on my site.

So time to tighten up the use of keywords by improving their relevance and value: ensuring that my site appears as high as possible when people type in relevant search terms in google, and also ensuring that the most relevant (and highest value) adwords appear on my site.

Meet google’s keyword tool. Though it seems designed more for advertisers than for sites displaying their adwords, its excellent for showing two key pieces of info:

- the keywords most relevant to my site’s content that aren’t currently displaying my site in their search results

- the value of those keywords in terms of advertiser competition

Running the tool for my site, I have now identified a number of high value and relevant keywords that my site’s content isn’t optimised for. e.g. “London sightseeing tour”. Testing it in google search confirms that my site appears nowhere (well, not in the first 4 pages of results, anyway).

So as its a high value search term and deemed by google to be relevant to my site’s content, its time to do some optimising.

I now see a morning of content editing ahead of me.

Writing page descriptions into the metadata of each key page of my site which include the high value, relevant keywords, and lightly peppering the keywords through the body of my site content.

It will be interesting to see in another month what impact if any these changes have had.

Some broad facts and figures:

- on my old site, google adsense adverts were generating earnings of around $5 a month simply based on the single link sitting neglected on my old home page

- over the past ten days alone, google adsense earnings from the new site have reached over $30, which should mean monthly earnings of around $90 once things settle down. Incredible! Earnings are already eighteen times more than they were from the old site, before I even do any further tuning of it

- the only thing I’ve done differently is making the google advert links a little more prominent and targeting them for different site sections

- earnings from the other affiliate links via Commission Junction (ie. the banner adverts) are currently £53, again simply in ten days. And yesterday I received my very first cheque from them.

- site visits are roughly the same as they were for the old site. In the first ten days, the site received 5,757 visits and 27,936 page views, averaging 4.85 pages per visit.

So it seems as though visitors are doing what I was hoping they would do on the new site – visit, take a look around at some of the ideas I’ve suggested for free things to do and see in London and then follow an advert to leave.

The purpose of the new site is somewhat different to what I wanted to do with the old one.

Whereas the main purpose of the old site was to enable me to try out new web technologies as I learnt about them whilst also feeding my other hobby – my interest in London’s history – the focus of the new site is less so.

Though I will still use it to test out new technologies and tools that I read about, this time around I also want to use it to try out things as I learn more about seo, affiliate advertising and analytics.

And if the site brings in a bit of extra cash along the way as a result of my tweaking, bargain!

After spending every weekend this year – and many evenings – working away at it, it feels strange to suddenly not have to write content, design pages and fix bugs.

The good news is that after only 2 days since it was launched, I am already seeing double the amount of revenue from Google Adsense. Very encouraging.

There are still one or two bugs left to fix – in particular, the ajax form that worked so well on my testing server now fails to work on the “production” one unless I disable ajax from it completely. The code is exactly the same – but the hosting companies are different. So there’s another weekend’s work lined up, trying to figure out what’s wrong.

I already have a list of things to add to the site for phase 2, but I’m going to take a break from developing it further for a few months or so.

Apart from trying to fix the bugs and monitoring / tweaking the affiliate adverts to see the effect on revenue.

More later on the impact of the re-design on advertising revenue and traffic – I need to give it a few weeks to build up some stats.

All the content is now done apart from one page which I need to give a bit of thought to – the sitemap for visitors (not to be confused with the xml “sitemap” file that I will need to generate after the site goes live and upload to google to help them find my pages for indexing).

And I’ve managed to crack the problem of the map polylines not showing in IE7. Seems they don’t like KML format colour codes – no idea what they use but through a lot of trial and error I’ve found some 8 digit codes which work. Thankfully.

Other prep stuff I’ve done this weekend includes checking all internal and external site links and fixing quite a few, adjusting some of the sidebar content to make the site flow a bit better, fine tuning of section widths and changing a few images.

I’ve looked at the google analytics for the site and it seems it gets the least site traffic on Saturdays, so next Saturday will be the day I finally put it live.

Should be fun – and then I can get into doing something else for a change, like reading books on agile project management!

Thankfully I’ve so far managed to get the work done to plan – fuelled by chocolate, oranges and beer and driven by listening to excellent internet radio stations late into the evening, 6 nights a week.

And now I’m only one week’s content and three weeks overall from launch.

Here’s the plan at this point:

week 3 from launch: finish final section of content – indoor activities

week 2 from launch: complete research for bridges walk, update remaining content

week 1 from launch: produce sitemap, add new affiliates links, create re-directs from old site

weekend of launch: migrate files to new server, overwriting londonforfree files, generate google sitemap, change hardcoded image links in maps

week after launch: TEST, TEST, TEST

So far, so good. Let’s hope it lasts.