New Clients Website

A new client of mine (Mike of MJM Light Commercials – who just happens to be a good mate too) wanted to promote his Hoylake, Wirral based used vans business online. So a while back we registered a suitable generic domain (.co.uk and .com) and starting today have gone down the wordpress route only using a static homepage rather than a latest posts page. With a bit more effort and tweaking it’ll be a nice little site.

It’s good that small, real world businesses can benefit from an online presence without actually selling the main product online. Not only does Mike have another promotional avenue for his vans but his business can benefit from better advertising rates from classified ad publications because he has a website. Additionally, we’ll be looking at somepoint to cross-sell products and services such as insurance, satnav and security systems.

I suspect I’m due a Guinness or two!

Hiding Pages In Wordpress

Depending upon your chosen wordpress theme, everytime you create a new page a link to that page automatically appears in your sites navigation menus.

That’s fine if the page contains juicy content but you probably don’t want to make your privacy policy or your site credits pages too prominent – they clutter up the nav menus and detract from your real content.

Previously, I have been tinkering with the header.php code including an extra bit of code to exclude specific page numbers. But not any more! There’s a great little plug-in called exclude pages – download here – that simply adds a dialogue box to the righthand sidebar when editing pages. Just tick the box if you want the page including in the nav menus, or don’t if you don’t !

As usual, test it to make sure it’s working for you on your chosen theme.

Its The Little Successes That Keep You Motivated

The temptation when working from your home office to do something other than work is always there. Browsing the BBC for the footy (Liverpool fan here) and news, reading way too many blogs and checking too many domain name ideas …well hands-up, I’m guilty m’lord on all counts. Looks like I’m not alone though – working from home does require self discipline from all members of the household.

But then I’ve just spent just five minutes on a task that I always find hard going too – asking for (free) links – and bingo, I’ve just acquired an on-topic link for one of my newer sites.

And then the other day I tried promoting another product sold by amazon and whilst it’s not going to be a runaway success it’s showing enough promise that I’ll be spending more time promoting similar products. Manage to wring out an additional £5 profit each day and that equates to a handy £150/month, £1800/year – it could go towards an ever increasing gas bill !

These little and other insignificant successes in themselves don’t amount to much at all, but the cumulative effect is that they help you to stay in the zone.

What little things do you do to keep you motivated?

Flickr Stats

I’ve just been adding a couple of photos to my flickr account and having a browse through my account settings. I’d not noticed it before, but flickr now offer viewing stats for your photos and I can now see stats such as these: 15% of my viewers have come direct from google, 8% from this blog and 32% from within flickr itself. My most popular photo is the one of my google memory card that I blogged about last December.

You have to activate the stats and allegedly come back the following day to see them, though mine were available within 15 minutes.

I actually use flickr more than most other social networking sites because it find it useful. I’ve accounts at stumbleupon, linkedin and facebook but I hardly use them currently. I’ll endeavour to make an effort with these at some point, especially the applications and groups stuff within facebook (as recommended by, amongst others, Lee McCoy) but I just can’t be bothered with all that virtual bomb throwing, poking, wall writing palaver.

Liverpool 08 Business Connect

I heard about the Liverpool 08 Business Connect site recently and I’ve just registered for free. It appears to be a popular site with some 3700 organisations listed along with about 4600 individual members.

The aim of the site appears to be along the lines of a social networking site for people looking to do business in and around Liverpool (we’re over the water on The Wirral in Hoylake – home to the Open Golf in 2006 …what a fantastic event that was!). You can create your own profile page (here’s mine) and can search for other businesses and make contact. There’s supposed to be a members-only offer page too, though it’s currently missing.

I’ll let you know if I make any new contacts or drum up any business. Let me know if you’re also listed by the way – leave a comment here or get in touch.