billstone

Hi Andys. Man I feel your pain after finding myself in a similar situation just before christmas. With a family of 6 to feed all of a sudden the term 'freelance' didn't have quite the same charm or lustre attached to it. Especially not to my missus. The pressure was on to find some fee paying work that WASN'T building websites for people (because in a similar vein to that which you alluded), I'm a crap salesman too when it comes to selling myself. So why not add another string to your bow and become your own customer? Just before Heart Internet shut me down I had an idea for a new affiliate site. I was looking for a high ticket product I could sell without having to pay for it first. What I came up with was watches. After doing some research in the Google Adwords keyword tool I narrowed my domain shortlist down to one domain. menswatch.co. The Mens Watch Company. The keyword tool already told me lots of people were searching for 'Mens Watch' so it was a good 'exact match' domain to put a website on. So with a domain name in mind I dived into template monster and came up with a fantastic looking theme on which to launch my new watch company. Then the money ran out before I could buy, and populate this website with products linked to my amazon affiliate account, which allows me to sell £10,000 watches without having to hold them in stock. At this stage its worth mentioning the watch thing above is just one suggestion for a good niche. there are lots of others. I'm a content writer by trade writing thousands of words a week on all sorts of old ******. I can build a website as a means to an end and I'm familiar with all the popular CMS/ecommerce packages around for free, but an out and out designer I am not. The content is what brings the happy campers into my website and lots of it. So whilst your looking to build a portfolio for yourself, why not buy some of your own services and look into other ways of making a few quid, which will hopefully buy you some time to fine tune those sales methods. Good luck andy. PS. I'm doing some elancing now as well. It took some time to work through the dross but my last job was about 3000 words in total spread over 10 seperate articles of about 300 words each. Which paid me $100. I thought that was a fair fee for something which took me a couple of hours to deliver. Its slow but it is getting there finally. If you fancy comparing notes on working through the hard times keep the conversation going. I got a ton of stuff to share. Not all successful I hasten to add.

There's nothing between them for me. Certain sites will require certain things which I personally find easier to do in Joomla (autofeeding external RSS feeds as posts for instance). Other wordpress fans will have a polar opposite opinion. Orses for courses I guess.

CMS theme designers are already taking the legwork out of creating resposive sites by creating themes which are responsive by default. Most of the newer Joomla themes (2.5+) are already responsive out the box so in that instance there shouldn't really be any extra charge I suppose. But web designers are in business to make money and any service you can use to add value to your proposition could earn you a few quid more. Or it could be used as a closing lever. 'Sign up today and we will 'waive' our resposive website premium' or summat like that. Thinking aloud.

SEO is being marketed as if it were some new dark art which should come with a 4 figure price tag. In actual fact with a bit of know-how its really straightforward to register a new domain (or use one which already exists), create some content and go straight to the top of google for a search of your chosen key words. I do it time and again, using the same formula and it never fails me. If it makes you feel any better you can read all there is about keyword density, google sitemaps, search engine optimisation etc. But in truth you really don't need to. Create a website, write some great content, put that content in front of people who may be interested in it (via social networks frinstance, lots of social networks), and before you know it, its happened and your at the top of the pile.

For a quick 'outa-the-box' fix there are companies around who offer CMS themes designed with social networks in mind. Like Rocket Themes for instance, or Gavick Pro. Basically its a tricked up Joomla or wordpress website with added modules and components for better dealing with extended user profiles, photo galleries, walls, groups, pages etc, just like you get on facebook. To really get the best out of these sites though a certain knowledge of HTML and CSS is advisable. Not much, but certainly a bit. But to give yourself a head start download a firefox plug-in called firebug. That will allow you to investigate every piece of html and CSS that appears in your browser simply by right clicking on it. It also allows you to make temporary CSS changes in your browser window before making more permanent changes to the actuall CSS style sheet. Which can save on mistakes whilst experimenting with new designs. Its a great way of getting an understanding of CSS, HTML and how they interact.

Dreamweaver still has its place in the web masters armoury. There always comes a time when I can't quite remember this syntax or that, so I will often jump into dreamweaver, create what it is I want to create, then rip the code out the coding window and paste into my CMS. Its handy for doing stuff like importing adsense ads and putting them somewhere they wouldn't normally be. Or for fine tuning formatting of text and images. Every CMS gives you an HTML window to write code directly into, so dreamweaver will get you by when you are feeling lazy or perhaps dont know how to code a particular facet of the website. Its a great bit of software. I love it.

I would recommend starting afresh with something which has a support network around it. Lots of great free CMS on the market with huge communities behind them. Do some reading. Pick one. Upload it. Booom. Joomla and Wordpress are really easy to use and great at handling a lot of assorted media like files, music, video etc. Drupal also has a hardened following although I always found it clunky and not very intuitive.

There's another plugin called feedwordpress (all one word) which will pull in that feed and if set up right can post each individual feed item as a new post on your site. Which is great for your sitemap but a word of warning. If your site relies too heavily on feeds and not enough on fresh user generated content you could get a hit off google after their last algorithm change (called penguin I think). But find a happy medium between the two and its happy days with tonnes of free content..

You could try setting it up as the software wishes to set it up, grab the URL of the page you wish to show, then turn off the menu setting created by the software and add your own linking directly to the URL you grabbed in the previous process. The menu entry reads whatever you set it up as, it clicks through to the page you want to display so everything should work out fine if I've understood the question correctly .

If you have a bunch of files which end with .htm or .html I'm not sure if there's a way to import those directly into a CMS without enclosing them in a wrapper or doing it manually. Or rather if there is I don't know how. Once upon a time dealing with raw html files was really all there was but these days CMS make life so much easier both for the client who now has a password and username protected portal through which he or she can update their website as well as the designer, who can quickly teach even a complete novice how to update a joomla or wordpress site in an hour or two. If you intend to have any sort of ecommerce functionality then Joomla may well be your best choice (or at least one of them) but for a website which builds its reputation on great content and lots of it you will struggle to find anything easier to use and maintain than wordpress.

Uploading a wordpress site from a local dev server to the internet is a painless, 20 minute task carried out using the FTP protocol (File Transfer Protocol). You simply upload everything in the site root folder, to your public_html folder on the server. You will need a freely available piece of software to carry this out for you. Filezilla is my recommend. easy to use, relatively quick and free so it ticks all my boxes. Wordpress has a number of free sitemap plugins which will document each URL on the sitemap.xml page as its created. So once you finish creating your 5000 recipe pages, the full sitemap is already built for you, listing each URL in full.

It was late 2005. All the buzz on the web was about niche marketing. It was going to be huge, if you could just find a niche which wasn't already saturated. I had found mine. In 2004 then Home Secretary David Blunkett announced he was going to reclassify cannabis from a more serious B class to a less serious C class, so as far as I could see the writing was on the wall. The left-of-centre press were apoplectic with rage that a Labour government would go anywhere near reducing the punishments for drug use, but the Labour party soldiered on and the law was changed, even though the opposition were already threatening to change the laws as soon as they returned to power. But that was still a few years away. Tony and David were yet to carry out their underhanded deal which would see Blair shuffle quietly out the back door leaving former chancellor Gordon Brown at the reigns of GB PLC. Brown had different ideas about cannabis. He was an alcohol man (they all were/are - even Cameron used to be employed by the company which owns and operates the Tiger Tiger high street bar chain in the UK). Cannabis was the anti-christ to the alcohol industry. Here was a substance which could be grown in the back garden for just a few pounds, which offered all the same 'benefits' of alcohol, but without the kidney disease. It had to be stopped at all cost and if the alcohol industry would put some money into stopping it Gordon Brown would bring about 24 hour licensing in return. So a PR campaign was instigated in the press. 'Celebrity' bloggers like Peter Hitchens at the Daily Mail got involved and before you knew it the UK was in the teeth of a 'cannabis psychosis' scare, whipped up by the press, and fanned by the politicians. 'Cannabis is not the friendly substance our parents smoked in the 60's' claimed a once pro-cannabis Independent newspaper. 'We apologise for supporting cannabis reforms' screamed their front pages. So the die was cast. Over the next few years there was going to be an awful lot of interest in cannabis and the news surrounding it. I realised quickly that Google News was missing this very important flavour of news which was written from the other side of the coin from the anti's, so I set about creating it myself, and my career as an affiliate marketer/content creator was underway. So in 2006 I signed up as a Heart Internet reseller account customer. My vehicle? A cannabis news website which I planned to pitch to Google News as an official google news source. I hope you will stay with me as I chronicle my experiences over the last 7 years with them. I realise there are a lot of supporters on here and some of them wont like some of the things I have to say. Which is why I came here in the first place after researching 'Heart Internet complaints' online. But the fact is its a tough world in which to try and make a living sitting in front of your computer (the holy grail we all seek right?), so the last thing you need to find out 7 years down the line is the fact your hosting company hasn't, nor ever has had, your back when things go wrong. As they inevitably do from time to time. At the start of December 2012 I was ticking over quietly as an affiliate marketer, with about 25-30 websites in my reseller account as well as a bunch of domains which were just parked, waiting on my next bright idea. Today I'm unemployed. Heart Internet switched off my account on January 16th over an unpaid bill for £44. Even though they were aware I wished to keep my websites. I had offered to pay by paypal and more recently I offered either a cheque or postal order. My files and websites? Deleted. My business e-mails? Deleted. But perhaps more importantly all of my support tickets within my account? Also deleted. Suffice to say I'm pretty pissed off. But rest assured this is no witch hunt. I just have some information, both good and bad, which i feel people in the same industry as me could well benefit from in the future. So I'm happy to share and perhaps enlighten. I'm not anti Heart Internet. Far from it. As a great many members on here have commented in various posts and threads, I agree the support is quick and polite and the machinery itself is all but bullet-proof. For anyone looking for the ability to recognise a market, register a domain, create a website and target an entirely new niche all within an hour or two, Heart Internet has all the tools to make it easy. But they can't get anything right when people are involved. Really, they're hopeless. And where peoples livelyhoods are at stake, that matters. Please don't come in and say "I been with them x years and everythings fine". Perhaps you were lucky? If so good for you. But what about the unlucky ones? They're the reason I'm here as I feel I'm one of them. But first off I'll explain in my next post how I managed to owe them £44 in the first place. Stay tuned. Bill Stone