Kenninghall Creations » Web Design

The Sandbox

Duncan — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:00:56 +0000

If anyone who creates websites says “The Sandbox”, it is probably all that is necessary to make other web masters nod their heads in a minor display of commiseration. Any new site stands a chance of feeling the effect of the Google’s mythical sandbox where a sites search rankings are likely to be negatively impacted until it builds up some credibility.

The breast cancer site I built last week using devhub initially showed up quite quickly in the Google results. I thought, “Great! I stand a chance of getting this thing noticed.” Well I think I was a bit premature. The last couple of days the site hasn’t shown up at all when I looked for it. Even a new post with some carefully chosen long tail phrases aren’t appearing even though they should for those specific phrases.

It looks like I have my work cut out for me. If I can’t get the site appearing soon, it may be no use at all. With a deadline of early September for fund raising, I can’t afford to have the site completely off the radar.

New Web Site Service – DevHub

Duncan — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:28:55 +0000

I saw DevHub mentioned at SitePoint yesterday, so I thought I would sign up and check it out.

I spent about an hour playing with the tools creating two sites. Both are setup as subdomains of devhub.com which is one option or you can point your own domains to the sites being created.

The first site called VanGogh is for me to see what I can build and how well I can really monetize the site. It is really crude at the moment as I have just scratched the surface of the tools capabilities. There are a lot of things I want to figure out, especially how to add some custom HTML, external links, and better control of the built in modules.

The second site called BreastCancer is an attempt to do something more serious. My wife is doing the Toronto breast cancer walk this year, and I wanted to see what the site builder could do to help promote it. Again the site is quite crude at the moment as I spent about 10 minutes on it. The news feed is picking up related articles, and the video module picked up a topical segment. There will be lots more tweaking to come. What are the odds people will find the site? Who knows, but it is worth a try. After 1 day the site reports are showing $0.01 income which along with anything else it and Van Gogh earns until September will be added to my wife’s slowing growing tally.

Buy Books and Help Australian Bushfire Victims

Duncan — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:56:57 +0000

SitePoint is an Australian based company in the Web Design/Development domain. They publish quite a few books related to this field, and I have a number of them in my library already.

To raise money to help the victims for the bushfires in their country, they are currently offering a deal on PDF versions on a wide selection of their titles. For $29.95, the usual price of one book, they are offering five titles in PDF format. 100% of the purchase price goes to the Australian Red Cross Victorian Bushfire Appeal.

The offer lasts until this Friday, February 13. Visit the 5 for 1 page at Sitepoint.

I’m going to take advantage of it to pick up a few titles I was undecided about adding to my library, but having the PDF version will give me a good opportunity to review the entire book rather than the 4 chapters normally available from their site. Who knows; I may add the hard copy versions to my library later.