Forums 

A good way to make money online is to setup a forum. The great thing about a forum is that it is really easy to administrate and its a great way to get started as being a web master.

Like everything, there are pro’s and con’s of forums, such as:

Pros:

• Users create content
• Easy to manage
• Lots of packages out there to use
• Easy to implement ad’s site-wide
• Community Atmosphere with Administrators, Moderators and Members
• Free themes to use for all major packages

Cons:

• Needs administration
• Can require full time or a team of moderators.

Often the best topic to start a forum on is a hobby of yours, that way you already know enough to answer questions and queries from the members and you can also help create content, you don’t have to be a professional on the topic but knowing about it helps.

Some good forum packages are:

• phpBB
• vBulletin
• Vanilla
• Invasion Power Board 

Enjoy.

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This morning while sitting down having breakfast I was reading the local newspaper and saw that it costs 92k (NZD) a year to keep a prisoner in jail. Thats $2000 NZD a week!!, this just makes me so angry. In a country where the average yearly income is around 24k a year, this is bullsh*t. These are murderers, rapists and other bottom feeders. I know this isn’t technology related but its utter bullsh*t that these costs are so high!!

The country is New Zealand, where the government is almost as bad as that of America.

Click here for the full story

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I have been trying idea’s out lately to see quickly what can get me the best return on my investment of time. A website I launched yesterday called DatingHelpEbook.com, the idea behind DHE is that there are thousands of ebooks being brought online everyday through affiliates and its time to cash in. What I have done is found an ebook and implemented a themed website to better help conversions.

I will keep you posted with update, have a look at the website and see how I have done it. It is really simple to setup and some of the better affiliate programs provide you with content.

So keep an eye out for updates on what my results are like.

Enjoy.

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Today I was cleaning out my PC and accidentally removed Firefox, so I reinstalled it and as I was doing that I thought I would see if there was any new add-on’s that I would like. Currently I use the developer tools and SEO Quake. Both of which are completely awesome.

But today I found a tool called iMacros, now this add-on is like the holy grail for web masters. Not only can you do things like create macro’s to automate testing your site etc, but there is a feature called Extract which strips out content from HTML and other bits and pieces which is great when you need to pull content from a site as opposed to doing it manually. Of course there are website’s that you can’t do this to for copyright reasons but its an amazing tool and I think you should try it.

 iMacros has many uses:

(1) Form Filler on Steroids and Password Manager

iMacros for Firefox relieves the repetition of checking on the same sites every day, remembering passwords, and filling out web forms. iMacros is the only form filler that can auto-fill web forms that stretch over several pages. All information is stored in human-readable, plain text files that can be easily edited. Passwords are stored securely with 256-Bit AES encryption.

iMacros is a good alternative Solution to Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO). Users memorize only one master password. iMacros remembers all the rest, and provides true automated logins (a better Single Sign-On).

(2) Web Automation

iMacros can also automate the download of pages (with or without images) and all kinds of images or files. In the other direction it can also automate the upload of data from a file to websites. You can use variables inside the macros, and import data from CSV files. It includes user agent switcher, PDF download and Flash, ad and image blocking functions.

The recorded macros can be combined and controlled with Javascript, so even very complex tasks can be scripted.

(3) Data extraction/Web Scraping/Web mining/Enterprise Data Mash-ups

Just the opposite of form filling. With the EXTRACT command you can read data from a website and export it to CSV files. iMacros includes full Unicode support and works with every language, including multi-byte languages such as Chinese.

(4) Web Testing

Web professionals use the iMacros add-on for functional, performance, and regression testing of web applications. With the built-in STOPWATCH command exact web page response times can be captured. iMacros also includes support for many AJAX elements.

iMacros can be combined with other extensions such as Greasemonkey, Web Developer, Firebug, Download Statusbar, NoScript, Tab Effect, Fasterfox, SwitchProxy, Foxyproxy, Torbutton, Flashblock, VideoDownloader, DownThemAll, MinimizeToTray, FireFTP, Screengrab, RSS and Atom feed reader or Adblock without any problems.

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I’ve found a HostGator coupon for $9.94 off your order, so if you are buying their baby account its only .01 cent for the first month!!

Coupon Code: “jury”

Click here to go to HostGator and use the coupon. It asks for it on the page where you confirm your order and just before making payment.

If you haven’t got a HostGator account yet, then what are you waiting for?? Its the best hosting service I have used, and I have had to go through a lot of crap hosting companies (including the a**holes @ GoDaddy) to find them.

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Recently I read a thread on the SitePoint Forums, basically what it boils down to is a bunch of web developers/designers beating back and forth with one side saying that you should turn down work if what they want is not something you want to show off in your portfolio and the other side saying you are a contractor and you shouldn’t be working to build your portfolio, but instead be working to help the client with what they came to you for, a website.

Now my stance on the subject is to agree with the fact you are contracted to do work for the client and whether or not it is good enough for your portfolio is irrelevant.

But what I don’t agree with is that the other side is saying turn down the client if they want to do a design you don’t like. There is only one reason you should ever turn down a client, and that is because they are completely impossible to work with. I’m talking about the client that is a pain is the butt.

You are there to help the client put their want’s and need’s into a website because they are not trained to write html/css/php/javascript/ajax/asp/etc. If they come to you and say “Design me a website that is cutting edge and has an award winning design” then you can force your design idea’s upon them but even then if they don’t like it then eat the humble pie and get over it. This post talks about how they interview the client and get an idea of the requirements and they try not to think about the design. 

You are the Employee and they are the Boss, deal with it. I think its just a wide spread case of ‘High Horse’ Syndrome.

What do you think?

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Ok, yesterday I posted about how times are changing and I now want to start the ball rolling by giving you some ways that you can make that extra money to help get those bills (and your income) being paid.

The more interest in this I get the more I will post, so if you like this topic then don’t hesitate to let me know.

Now, this idea is half for web design companies and half for anyone. What I will do is explain it and then tell you the two ways you can implement it. So lets get into it.

Web Hosting Reselling

Now you may be thinking, ahhh web hosting but that takes so much time and you need to know all about servers and linux etc. Well your wrong, HostGator (among many) is a web hosting company that provides you with the ability to buy a reseller account without any limitations, plus with this you get all sorts of things, one of which is the ability to setup you web hosting website and it becomes completely automated. There is no limit on the amount of domains etc you can have.

What is a Reseller account?

A reseller account helps the large web hosting companies effectively sell more products but because its at such a low price that you can easily onsell it. It allows you to give your customers a cPanel to log into and manage them from your admin panel. To get more of an idea about this there is a demo account created at HostGator’s website under the reseller link that you can login the both the admin and customer cPanel and see how everything works. The great thing about this is there basic account is so cheap that its no lost if you only sell a couple a small accounts ($29 USD is there lowest reseller account). Please note I’m using HostGator as an example and because I use them personally I know they are good, there is plenty of other large web hosting companies that provide reseller account but I haven’t used them and therefore can not recommend them.

For Web Design Companies

Now if you run a web design business you can make yourself appear bigger by offering your own fully branded (HostGator allows you to re-brand so your customers only see your logo’s) web hosting setup. This is great because when you are doing a client’s website instead of buying a web hosting account with some other company you can sell them yours. Its great, the sweet thing is that they can login (if they are into the hands on thing) and use a fully functional cPanel.

For everyone else

To get your sales just setup a website, using the added software that HostGator gives you and and brand it all you want and then just go about marketing. You can use Adwords, word of mouth, what ever you want. The nice thing is with the HostGator account you get a paypal merchant account so they can pay online into your paypal account and its that easy.

I hope this gets the creative juices flowing and you start to think about the possiblities of having your own web hosting website. I will give you a list of packages that HostGator gives you and tell you about them so you realise that this really is as simple as it sounds.

WHMAutoPilot is a billing manager that allows you to automate practically everything.

Hosting Templates are a collection of premade web hosting websites so you don’t have to do any HTML work.

eNom Domain Reseller Account will allow you to also sell you customers domains with their hosting, you need a domain.

PayPal Merchant Account will allow you to recieve payments from your clients.

Now I’m not going to go out fishing for a collection of web hosting companies that provide this because thats a waste of my time. You do it, or go with HostGator. Do what you want, but I’m going to be reaping the benefits of upselling my web design clients with a web hosting package. Sorry if this was long, I wanted to make sure I covered everything.

Enjoy.

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Lately I have had a really bad effort block…and haven’t been doing as much work as I should be.

 Whats an ‘effort block’ you ask? well, its the same as a creative block but for effort. I like to use that term as opposed to ‘lazy’, doesn’t make me feel so bad.

Anyways I have been doing a lot of work lately on side projects and thought I might share my findings. As of about a month ago I came to the conclusion that for a Web Design company to survive (without already having a large established client base) there needs something else. In my local city there is so many web design companies, this is mainly because people seem to think if they know HTML then they are a web designer (and basically they are) and it shows when you look at their portfolio, but this post isn’t to flame crappy designers.

What this post is about is this, for you to survive you can’t rely on clients. I recently read a post on SitePoint.com and to sum it up it says that how to land good/big clients you can’t be a ‘technican’ but you have to be a business person. To sell yourself you don’t (saying that I’m this and that I can do that, basically self promotion) but instead telling them how much better you can make life for them and how easy it is to work with you. This brings me back to my point that as a small web design company you can’t focus on web design. This is because to land the big fish you have to spend a large amount of time pitching and working on getting the projects as opposed to working on the project. But the problem is, if you are a small (a few people) business then spending time on pitching, etc. and not actually building websites then you will soon notice the bank account balance go down.

What can I do to fix this? well, (this is what I have been getting to slowly…sorry) you can do you own in-house projects to help bring in the money, if you are not keen on starting a website up and trying to build its momentum then try going to the SitePoint.com Marketplace for a website to buy, you would be surprised at what you can get for under $1000. Once you have a website you can then monitize it (if not already monitized) and use that to help pay the bills. Many people think that this is stupid because its such a small amount of money but if you work on your websites you can get a considerable amount. I have been reading a blog lately about a guy that has small handful of average size sites (under 6 I think) and he is making 3500 each month. Then when you consider the lump sum amount you could get if you sold your site on something like the SitePoint.com’s Marketplace.

This matters when you only get a couple sales or less a month and those sales are only for a small company website. I hope this helps you if your running or thinking of starting a web design business. Don’t do it because you are a web designer (if thats your reason the go freelance) but do it because you like doing business and managing a business because you will find that its less and less web design and more and more managing the business and dealing business relationships.

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This is hilarious, they managed to get someone who sounds just like a guy that does the normal voice overs.

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