Nathan

In terms of SEO it will make no real difference unless the site happened to be within the Web Design niche. In terms of promotion, the bigger companies do actually do it. Not on their high profile customers because 90% of the time its in the contract that your not allowed to leave any mention of yourself in the code, which means no link back. In terms of promotion I don't actually know if it makes much difference. All my work is word of mouth or I am found through SEO.

Nice to see a fellow Dundee student! Although I am no longer a student. Ethical hacking, you must be at Abertay then? I graduated from Abertay in 2010 from Web Dev. Is it worth it? Financially in the short term, yes and no. You will make more regular money from your part time job. You will never make enough regular money to quit the part time job. I tried for 2 or 3 years to quit my part time job to go freelance but with ever 2 good months I had 2 bad months where I wouldn't have much. Your best option is to either save the extra money you get or just treat yourself when you do get it because its very unregular to start off with. Maybe go to the Nether for a few pints Long term though, the experience will set you for the rest of your career. What I done was email all the small web companies in Dundee hunting for work experience. I done this a few times a week for about 3 months and eventually one of them gave me a 1 work placement at the start of the summer break between 2nd year and 3rd of Uni. I was kept on over the summer and had a total blast. I am still very good friends with the company owner that gave me the chance and opened the door to the rest of my career. From there I never looked back, I seemed to always have freelance work but for all the work I done I never had regular payments in order to just quit the part time job. When it comes to exam time you NEED to have the ability to just not think about freelance and stop all extra working... something I made a mistake with and ended up paying for. I took too much on and ended up letting some people down, but mostly I let myself down because I should have known better. So, in short... Don't go freelancing looking for clients of your own until you have experience of how the industry works. Clients will push and push and push, you need to learn how to manage client expectations and have a firm hand when telling them no. This is something you either learn from watching someone else like at a small company, or you learn the hard way by burning bridges with clients and losing money yourself. Client management is the one thing Abertay can't teach you. If you ever have questions about the Dundee web scene just message me, I might even be able to pass stuff your way!

I wasn't asking for advice. I am giving it Selling products and services I won't be covering because I don't have experience other than selling SEO and Web Dev services. Affiliate marketing though is the easiest way of making serious money and it can be mixed with ads which can provide a small boost. Its easy if you follow a few simple rules, which I will go through in on of my next posts. Payouts for physical goods are generally lower than digital products or services. Also, most people turn to the biggies such as Amazon and big brand website for affiliate. There are loads of different affiliate programmes which offer double the standard amazon payout. You don't need serious traffic if your content is good enough to entice someone to buy. I have a website that gets at most 100 people a day and usually 3 people will buy everyday. Thats $30 a day. With regards to picking a niche most people make the mistake of targeting something like adult, web design or something else very broad and trying to cover all the topics at once. What you need to do is pick a domain which is broad and then start by targeting smaller parts of the niche for example you can have a general photography blog but start by targeting only specific cameras to have reviews, then supply tutorials for those cameras with examples etc. Start small and work your way up.

I have been apart of the WDF since 2007, if I remember correctly. I have been through everything from being self employed, having a full time development job (which I still have) and also making websites for myself. The one that I really love, is creating a site myself and trying to make a living from it, something I have been doing for a while now. There are a lot of people that post on blogs and forums saying they want to make a website so they can make money, thats wrong in my opinion. If your main objective is to make money then you will find it difficult. Your main objective should be to communicate with people with the same interest as yourself. This can be anything from a football team, genre of movies or even photography. It can be literally anything. What you should do is provide content to readers that will really interest them, spark an emotion or an action. This content should be in the form of hands on reviews, videos, tutorials, personal accounts of what you have experienced. None of this generic 500 word articles that can be bought for $5 with SEO'd content, barely readable and probably spun for the 50th time. I have been asked to look over why websites doesn't make money for friends and acquaintances on a few occasions, in every case the reason has been the emphasis of the website was always on getting people into the site and throwing ads at them from every direction possible with terrible content or content that just doesn't inspire someone to read past the 1st paragraph. Your website MUST be geared around great content that people want to read, share and discuss - off of the back of this you will start making money and can introduce affiliate links into your great content. I am currently doing a tutorial series from deciding the niche you should make a website about right up to making that first £1. It will likely be across the next 2 weeks and split into 5 parts. I would really love a little feedback with regards to what you guys look for when trying to make money online, what questions do you ask yourself, do you really know how SEO works for 2014?

Just wanting to know if you can spare a few minutes to answer my questionnaire for my research dissertation for my university project. If anyone is going through the same thing I will return the favour http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=KHDMJI_d57cc7c6 Much Appreciated!

I am at University doing Web Design and Development. It has been a great help as it gives the most recent and up to date methods but, recently I have been doing work experience and have learnt alot from working in the agency... So maybe it would be a good idea to do home studying for a few months and make sites for your self then do a week at a local agency (unpaid) just to get some good sites in your portfolio. Since doing work experience I have got two freelance jobs, working with a music label and doing some sites for a guy that I know. So experience is all you need, but obv you need the skills first.

Ben Stiller

The older design looks much better, more professional Your design is good though.

In my practice, if someone asks for a site and you have the feeling you will get more work from them then you charge a cheaper price for the original work, then for the extra stuff like maintaining the site you can charge a little more than you normally would Get the client to come back to you, he will have asked others for prices so try to under cut, with the intention of maing the money back... Don't under cut too much... I would charge approx £500-750 for a site similar to what you have descibed but I would be supply hosting and my basic SEO service aswell. It all depends on how long it will take you and what you value your time at.

no, use something like notepad 2, or notpad++

to get started use something like notepad2 that way you will learn Thats what I done.

are you meaning the borders around the thumbnail? Why don't you just put the thumbnail into a DIV which has a back ground image of your desired effect? then just messaround with the padding and margins to get everything sitting properly, also there are some issues with cross browser on your site...

Thanks, I have that book and the code dosn't work lol... They supply you with a shopping cart model but it just dosn't work when you take the same ideas and methods and change them for my own script... their code looks very messy etc. I will have a look at the directory though

No body have anything that can help?

Hey, Just want to know what you guys think of this music video I helped film with a local web design agency that I freelance for. Any comments? I am still trying to get a good camera though, I have still to get the money together... Anyway, this is the video here http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ykkjDY0yWVs

Most of mine have fell alot, but I am getting more traffic now than I ever had. I have one site that was PR5 for about a year, its fell to PR2 but I get an extra 2500 unique visits mostly from search engines.PR means something to a site if you want it to mean something, if you have a website and care about sales or profits then you should look more at traffic than page rank.

I am making a small website for my uncles shop, I need to create a shopping cart. I am using codeigniter and would like to make my own, I have previusly had trouble with making my own so would like to know if any one has made one before?

I have pre-ordered my copy of CS4, student version of course lol... It is due to be shipped around the 14th Nov...

after many hours searching google, I have gave up. I think it can't be done lol... before you ask, its not for my profile, its a clients, they want there myspace page the same as there newly designed website lol...

I want to change the link colors in the contact table on a myspace profile. I don't want to use an image for it, it has to be just a color change. Does anyone know how I do it? Thanks.

foo fighters Metalica Queen Slipknot Just a few I like lol.

WOW yeah, you can really tell the difference. I think I may actually save for a while and get the Canon HV-20. Thanks.

Cool, Thanks its working. But now I have another problem haha... I will post here if i cannot fix it myself lol

I use notepad 2 myself, or notepad++ at university. Both do what you want

layout looks really good, its clean and easy to navigate Only things I have noticed is the HTML isn't valid and there is javascript within the html file. Try to use unobtrusive javascript, it makes things easier to work with. You an read up on how to do this by googleing it... Also I think the footer content would look better if it was aligned to the rght hand side if the div... Just suggestions though