I'm at Drummond Golf Newcastle (Unit 2, 58 Northcott Dr, Kotara, NSW 2289, Australia) - http://bkite.com/02ur4 8 hrs ago

Targeted Pain Relief

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!

paingone-art.jpg

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

Website updates galore!

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.matpacker-art.jpg

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