Archive for March, 2008

Well it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve updated you about my progress on Lite n Easy, partially because there was a week or two where I didn’t lose any weight but I blame myself for that seeing as I was drinking a few beers.

Anyway I’m properly back on the Lite n Easy wagon now and with the weight I lost last week I’ve managed to lose 10kg so far, so that’s 10kg in 5 weeks..not bad at all really.

The good thing about losing weight this way is that it’s sustainable loss, ie. you don’t put it back on straight away unlike some other rapid weight loss diets where you usually have put it all back on within a week or two.

Week 6 is just about to start, in fact it should be being delivered in an hour or so….hrmmm I might grab a few photos, or a video, of the unpacking process as you’ll get a good idea of exactly what is involved with dieting with Lite n Easy.

So stay tuned for some photos or video, not sure if I’ll be able to upload them this morning as I’ve got to go to Sydney for a meeting, but I’ll try and get them uploaded later today when I’m back.

Take it easy, Matt

Yesterday I jumped right into the design for the new product website for the Pain Gone pen, Targeted Pain Relief. The list of things to get done was quite large, and there’s still a few bits and pieces that need to be completed, but I think I managed to make a big dent in the project.

Here’s what I got through;

• installed and configured wordpress
• installed and setup new theme purchased from Brian Gardner
• chose the colour palette (this was a big debate)
• customised the CSS to fit the new colour palette
• customised the navbar, background, footer, arrow, search, etc. images to fit the new CSS
• setup Google Webmaster account for TPR, submitted sitemap
• setup Google Analytics account for TPR, installed tracking urchin
• bought advertising on Google Adwords
• started loading up the content

And here’s what’s left to do;

• finish loading content, testimonials and product information
• install shopping cart and link to merchant bank account
• sit back and relax

Actually there is probably more than that to do but you get the idea that most of the work was completed yesterday. Big thanks to my mate up in Queensland, Greg, who helped me out with a bunch of problems at 10pm last night!

This morning I ran into a small problem with the Targeted Pain Relief website, it took ages to load! After a bit of checking around it turns out that Servage, my domain hosts, seem to be having load issues. Seeing as this is a business website, and needs to be up all the time and speedy. I’m going to start looking around at other hosting services. So far I’ve had a few suggestions, from the guys at Twitter, but none of them have been really what I’m looking for so I spoke to a mate who knows all about business hosting and he’s suggested Media Temple so I’m going to give them a go. At this stage I wont be moving it all till the weekend as I’m pretty stuck with other projects but I’ll let you know how I get on.

Anyway, I’ve gotta try and catch up with the work needed on the I’m With The Band website that I was supposed to complete yesterday….eeeep

Head on over to the Targeted Pain Relief website and have a look, let me know what you think… Oh and dont be too critical of the content, remember I’ve still got that to complete.

Cheers, Matt

In a week where my RSS subscriptions have been dominated by news and commentary from SXSW I figured this was going to be a difficult TBOTW to put together, in actual fact it’s been very easy as there is still some fantastic content being produced by the ’smaller’ name blogs while all the big guys are at SXSW.

So here’s this weeks The Best of The Week!

11 Must Have Firefox Extensions by Shoemoney - as a Firefox user I’m always looking out for good extensions that will speed up my workflow, there’s a couple of ‘must haves’ in this list.

and why not follow that up with another software one, and I know there’s a fair number of Mac users reading this blog last time I checked Google Analytics

5 Amazing Mac Apps for Getting Things Done by Zen Habits - The ideal for anyone interested in Getting Things Done (more on GTD, and more)– or just being productive and organized, for that matter — is to be able to quickly add things to your to-do lists without interrupting your work; to be able to see what you need to do right now, without worrying about everything else; to be able to organize stuff without too much work.

The Blog Entrepreneur brought us this interesting article on Why Most Bloggers Will Never Succeed at Blogging - You don’t have to spend very much time surfing the blogosphere to deduce that a number of blogs get started and are posted on for a week or two, maybe even a few months, but then go dormant. Another bit of evidence is the sheer number of domains that are available for auction via GoDaddy or the various forums.

Seopher had some interesting things to say in his article on How to get success by authoring multiple blogs that I found pretty interesting as someone who is getting into authoring multiple blogs (I’m With The Band, Medical News Stat!, A Business is Born, Fat Stacks of Cash).

and on the topic of search engine marketing (SEO) Stoney over at Search Engine Guide gave us some insight that I think a lot of people would find useful in his article titled Sometimes Fixing a Site Means Breaking It First

and still on the topic of SEO check out the article on Daily Blog Tips with the tip on how you can Check How Search Engines See Your Website which you should bookmark as a valuable resource any time you do any changes to your website’s SEO! was quietly suprised on how this website shows up.

Last but not least check out Chris G’s Free eBook on Personal Branding written by Ted Demopoulos, why go out and pay a bunch of bucks for quality information you can get for nix, and it is quality information.

Anyway, those are some of the best articles to hit my RSS Reader this week. Hopefully there’s something amongst this lot which will help you out in the future, be sure to Digg and / or Stumble it for future reference, maybe even Subscribe to my RSS feed so that you get this delivered to you each week.

Till next week, Matt

Last week I re-did the I’m With The Band theme as we just partnered up with the local street press Reverb and needed to setup an area on the front page where people could download the latest edition of Reverb. When I did this theme change I had to mockup a quick header logo until I had the time to sit down and make a new logo / header.

The other thing we want to change up the I’m With The Band website is the colour scheme and the background as well. I’ve spent several hours on the Colour Lovers website checking out various colour palettes to try and get some inspiration, so far I’ve narrowed it down to about 10 different schemes…..arrghh. I think once I have the header logo design completed it might be a little easier to lock the colour scheme down.

Here’s a few websites that I find invaluable when it comes to colour scheming, web designs, logos and headers;

> Colour Lovers - a big database of user submitted colour combinations

> Vecteezy - user submitted vectors, free to download

> Brusheezy - Vecteezy’s sister site for photoshop and illustrator brushes

> Faveup - a gallery of cool website designs, logo designs, and flash designs

> CSS Tux - similar to Faveup, but dedicated to CSS designed websites

> iStockPhoto - a stock photo, vector, flash, and video website where you can buy different elements to construct your design

Anyway, I better actually get to work on this header / logo design instead of just sitting here talking about it. I’ll keep you posted on the I’m With The Band project as it progresses.

Cheers, Matt

This website here is pretty well an ongoing project, I’m almost constantly tweaking the CSS or PHP so I can change the way something displays or add in a new feature.

One of the reasons this blog is almost in a constant state of change is because it allows me to learn a lot more on a live platform that’s not so critical compared to some of the other websites I run. I’d rather make a mistake here than over on I’m With The Band.

The latest things added to the website here are TwitterTools, Flickr RSS and the eMail Subscription form. Here’s why I added them;

1. TwitterTools - Twitter is a constantly growing community of people who post short messages with varying degrees of information in them, sometimes it’s just a shout out and other times it’s about their latest blog article or even news events as they happen. It’s another addition to the growing citizen journalism world.

I’ve been using Twitter for a while now so I figured it was about time I integrated it with my website so that people can see / read what I’m up to. I often ‘tweet’ when I’m at gigs, playing golf, shooting photos, stuck in traffic, etc.

2. Flickr RSS - Pretty well everyone who shoots photos uses Flickr, it’s easily the largest photographic community in the world and Google seems to have recognised this recently by giving Flickr a whopping Page Rank of 9!

Anyway I’ve been using Flickr for a good 18 months or so and I figured it was about time I integrate it with my website a little better than just linking the odd photo, cue Flickr RSS.

3. And the final thing added today was the Feedburner Subscribe by eMail code in the sidebar. Feedburner has to be the quickest and simplest way to manage your RSS feeds and with giving people the option to subscribe in a reader or subscribe with eMail you’ve got both bases covered.

Currently my active subscriber count is around the 65 - 75 readers per day, hopefully this will continue to increase and specially with the ease of subscribing via email now.

All three pieces of code were relatively easy to install and only required minor additions to the CSS. Maybe a little down the track I’ll fancy them up a little but for now they serve a purpose and installing and tweaking them has given me a bit more experience for my other websites..

Let me know if anyone out there would like some instruction on getting any of these going on your websites.

Cheers

Matt