You know, the types who’ll sell you a “custom” website for £4k (5 pages only, template-based, and SEO advice extra, of course).

It made me think of my dad and how he goes bananas when I tell him how much it costs to service my car, and what they actually do for it. “£xx for an oil change!”  and so on. But he knows a thing or two about cars – don’t most dads??

But cars are as alien to me as the web is to him. I’m sure he’d think £4k for a website was a bargain. Even £10k.

And there lies the problem when it comes to these vendors. If you don’t know enough – just enough – about what service they are actually offering you, how much work they will do, how can you know whether you’re being ripped off or not. How would you know whether you are paying for something that is very difficult, or something that is quite straightforward (and therefore really shouldn’t cost as much).

So I thought about how someone could become better informed about the web. Not enough to be a developer but enough to know when you’re being taken for a ride.

In my view, its simple. Make use of all the free tools out there and build yourself a basic web site.

For example:

• get yourself a free web editing program, some cheap web space and a couple of good books (Bulletproof Web Design, for example), and create a simple web site. It doesn’t really matter what it’s about. The aim of this is to get an idea of standards-based design, html and css.
• Before starting, spend a little time doing the excellent free tutorials about html and css on w3cschools first
• Once you’ve created your site, upload it to your web space, stand back, be proud and have a cup of tea!

• then, check your site’s code by running your site’s live pages through the w3c markup validation service. This is a great way to learn more about coding and how to debug your site, which makes it work better across different browsers, load faster and be easier to update.

• then start exploring the world of plug-ins available for your site, starting with something simple such as a google adsense or an amazon affiliate plugin. (And maybe make some money

• while you’re at it, include some code from google analytics

By the end of all that, you’ll know a little about how easy it is to build a simple web site.

And when it all boils down, a simple site isn’t really that much different to how big CMS systems work. They still use css for design layout, they still use html / xhtml for content rendering, they still require metadata to be added to each page (keywords etc, which are important for SEO) and they still use javascript (and sometimes also iframes) for inserting plug-ins and pulling content through etc.

So you’ll also know at a basic level about how CMS systems work at presentation layer level.

(They also use design templates, content wizards, user permissions, application script calls and so on but the fundamentals of css, xhtml and javascript remain.)

You’ll still be a long way from being an expert but hopefully you’ll feel more informed about just how “difficult” some of this web stuff really is.

The web equivalent to being able to change your car’s oil yourself or at least know if you’re being ripped off!

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.

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!

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!

I’ve been using two of them for some time now on my current site: Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

The webmaster tools are invaluable for helping to highlight orphan / dead urls within your site e.g. for those occasions where you once thought a particular page was a great idea, created lots of internal links to it and then later deleted the page from your site.

And I have now discovered a new feature in the tools – (ok, maybe its been there for a while and I’m slow on the uptake).

They provide a section called Content Analysis. In particular, it lists the pages in your site that have duplicate short and long meta descriptions. Very handy as I update the meta data on my new site pages.

Google Analytics has always provided more information about my site than I think I will ever need to use. But in checking for the tracking code to use on my new site, I noticed that they have updated it.

Its hidden in the depths of their app and wasn’t easy to find (you can locate it under Analytics Settings > Profile Settings > Tracking Code). But in there they provide a new tracking code called ga.js.

This is Google’s explanation about this new code:

Use this tracking code to gain access to a wide range of exciting new features as they become available.

I’m not sure how long its been there – and whether the “new features” are actually available now but I was pleased to have discovered it: another thing to add to my new site.