Building a new site from scratch?

[JJMcClure]

For me conclusion is: if you are looking for "stable boat" build it on "standards"

Absolutely. Aside from anything else, building sites that mostly conform to WC3 ensures as much as you can that they'll be cross browser compatible. Like anything with websites, you can take that to the nth degree but for the most used versions of well known browsers, WC3 is a useful guide to how good your code is.

One useful tip that's helped me over the years is that Firefox always gets the code right and IE doesn't, so if your site is displaying properly in IE and not Firefox, it's your code that's wrong. If it's displaying right in FF but not IE, it's IE that's the problem. Really useful in determining where to start looking for display errors.

I don't know if this is still being advocated but when I was learning about building websites and good practice I was told you should always try to make sure your visitors can get to whatever they are looking for in no more than 3 clicks.

Yup. I still abide by that. Too many people build sites that they think look nice and forget that the only people whose opinion is important are the visitors themselves and they want a website they can actually use. Building a good website is about making it easy for people to find whatever they were looking for and keeping navigation as simple as possible.

Usability and Information Architecture, User Interface design, Good coding practices, Proper use of colour palettes, Semantic markup, mobile platform compatibility, cross browser compatibility...... there's a whole science behind a well built website that goes on behind the scenes and is what separates the pros from the neighbour's kid who can build you one for £50.

I stick to tried and tested layouts, not because I couldn't design something really avante garde and totally out there, but because people have very short attention spans online and familiar layouts stop them leaving in the first three seconds.

[Kay]

In past maybe that will be good, not organized ugly site, people confused and click on ad to leave site or they even don't know that is ad, but I just think, that today google becomes much better in finding such sites (various kinds of MFA) and blogs and that will not give them much traffic in future. (I have some of such blogs and sites and they were making money for years, but in past 6 months they are all going down slowly)

My experience concurs with yours. The tactic used to work very well but it's not so good now. (That's why I edited my earlier post to insert the word "necessarily", because it doesn't work so well now.) Have you developed any strategies to try to get the AS income back up?

There are several ways I can think of to combat this problem.

- switch to another ad network
We tried replacing AS with AdBrite, but their customer service was useless and we couldn't even get started with the ads.
Anyway, this tactic doesn't work if your site relies on G for traffic.

- clean up the site navigation
As you say, this is probably what G wants people to do. Also strip out some of the ad units. Apparently G doesn't like too many ads these days either.

- forget about concentrating your efforts on earning AS and concentrate instead in providing good content and a good navigational structure.
I think the days of MFAs are numbered. They're not quite over yet, but as a method of making money online they are rapidly going downhill.

[signorm68]

...Have you developed any strategies to try to get the AS income back up? ...I think the days of MFAs are numbered. They're not quite over yet, but as a method of making money online they are rapidly going downhill.

yes , but I am sure that you and other will not like it -> I "closed" that chapter in my business.

Simply some sites left and they bring much lower incomes which is decreasing and decreasing and some sold to people who think that this story have "next chapter". Those which I still have, I stop to invest time in maintenance, and whet they bring that is Ok, they paid off long time ago, simply my estimation that days ARE numbered to MFA and various kinds of "refined" but still MFA sites so think that is not best direction to put my effort there.

And why I decided that ?

year and something ago, when google started with intensive updates (panda 1,2,3,4 than thousand updates than those days penguin and so on) I was suspicious. When I get last year from friend, manual that google gave in summer camp to students which they hired, and told them that they (students) will "manually" clean google index, and when read that book with instructions, it was really clear that google actually going step further taking thousands of young and educated people, and give them ability to using that instructions select what is spam on web and what is not spam, that is ACTUALLY preparing for new generation of algorithm which will much better find out what is spam and what is MFA and what is real content made by people who know and are passion-ed about topics they are writing.

And if you see what happens in those days that is pretty clear that google really becoming better and better in taking ranks to MFA sites. They let humans to decide what is criteria for "low quality" or "middle quality" content and then let their machines learn from people. They machines (mean on google algorithm are not yet cleaver as humans but are really close)

So, if you ask me there are few solutions:

- focus on smaller number or sites, or on same site publish less but more quality content, forget writing for SE, write for people, it is just question of time when Goolge will in matter of minutes find and penalize low quality sites (in terms of SE ranks) no matter are they display ads or no.

-focus on things that until now wasn't so important like: site navigation, gui, ux, easy to use site, etc

-everything that will bring and keep visitor for longer time on site

-my opinion that time of those factors is coming, G already taking data about how long people stay out our site, which pages they read, how they navigate, do they repeat same page loading, and much more...


generally I think that google "force" us to be more focused and dedicated, to publish less quantity of content that will have more quality.

I personally refining and dropping a lot of own sites and blogs for last year. What has potential I am going deeply and improve, what doesn't, I sell or just forget and don't spend more time.

On the other side, switching to other networks is just not good enough. We all relay on G which gives us traffic and again on G which buy clicks from are ads and they are number one, who else can 1) bring such traffic to us? and 2) pay so much for click?

So, I think we should 'listen' what they said and what they not say buy we can read between lines, because our incomes are built around they business.

[JimWaller]

I was re-reading this thread, and the talk about planning a site on paper reminded me of a site design technique I ran across years ago.

When everything was hand coded, you used to have to be very organized in your approach to site building in order to make it user friendly. One way of getting organized was to write a brief description of each page on an index card and lay them out in order to see what needed to be on what level, and how many clicks away from another page. It is useful, because you can move things around and see what works best. to make a change, you just move the card. When you have a structure you like, you start coding it.

Now that there are tools that make it much easier to build a site, the same technique could be used but substituting tags and categories. Especially since categories allow for sub categories, and categories can have their own theme.

I know this is a little off topic, but I thought it might be useful. Hope this helps.

Jim