Japanese dogs (at least where I live) are mainly small ones like these ones that are walked near our house everyday. I’m waiting for a nice sunny day to take some better pics of them but here is a couple of snaps anyway.

This is Atom (the butcher’s dog) who looks cute but is not such a friendly dog:

Here’s Mal who gets over-excited and can’t keep still (yes he is real):

Here’s a dog I spotted being walked by the river that looks more like the Native breed of Japanese Akita (Great Japanese Dog)

Here are some pictures of georgious meals we had at a local restuarant.

And finally, washed down with a beer

I am a frequent poster on Weblamp.net - it’s a small but friendly webmaster discussion forum.

After spending some time in dialogue with the webmaster about how to make the forum more successful, I realized that I had a talent for spotting ways to improve forums or most other websites. Also, I am full of ideas which I’m frequently posting.

So, this has led me to set up my own new discussion forum ForumFixers.com At the moment I have set up the site and started posting my own articles. In time, I hope that it will become a nice little online community of people helping each other out with forum issues.

What I may do as a spin-off from this activity is to offer to set up forums for other people for a fee.

Each time I build a new website I simplify the page code so it is easier to make site-wide changes later on. The most basic step is to separate the styles from the content with an external style sheet.

To control positioning, sections of the page are then wrapped in DIV tags which reference the sytle sheet data. This eliminates table code.

Then I have common code in an external php file that gets inserted on every page such as the footer and logo. This results in neat and tidy page code that is easy to change.

But, each page still has duplicate information on it i.e. the layout of the functional blocks. So if I wanted to add a new block such as another navigation bar then I would need to change every page on the site.

So, what I am planning to do from now on is to have templates that define what goes on each page. Then each page will only differ by the title, an id number and the template type it is using. The id number is to use with a database to select dynamic content relevant to that particular page such as comments.
Now it would be easy to transform the whole site by editing the templates and css file i.e. we have implemented a theme system.

So this is my idea for a simple content management system. Unlike the CMS scripts that are available, I will edit the content and theme offline and upload any changes. Here’s why I like to do it like this instead of using a CMS script:

• I like to use a web editor for this task
• I want to understand how everything works in the code
• I like to hand code with neat looking code layout
• I want my site to be optimized for search engines
• I want a local copy of my site and all the content
• I’m only making a simple content site

The point about SEO is an important one since most CMS scripts struggle to create page urls that look natural, containing keywords. The reason is that it is easier to use numbers to represent pages where these pages are dynamically generated. For example, there may be one page containing a script that generates all the pages of a site. So urls may look like: page.php?number=12 To make the url into a search engine friendly one, special features of the web server need to be used which may not be available to many people.

As promised, it’s now launched!

http://urgentclick.com/cms/

Wow, that’s a mouthful isn’t it

You may have seen some sites that provide free stuff and ask visitors to click on links to generate them some PPC revenue. This is kind of like what I am talking about but this is not permitted by advertising companies and can easily get you banned and maybe black listed.

Better ways are to imply that the user can’t get what they want off you unless they do something in return.

Examples are they have to link to your site to get listed in your directory or link to you to get an entry in a free draw.

One thing I am trying out at the moment is to get people to sign up for a series of emails about one of my programs and enter a free draw in return for me giving them free advertising on one of my sites. After all, I did alot of work to give them this free service and it’s still free, but I ask them to spend a few minutes reviewing my offer in return. Unfortunately, I can’t automate the thing so I have to let them proceed even if they don’t do what I ask because I can’t tell automatically. All I can do is make them think they have to do it

Before I just hoped the ads on the site would generate revenue which they do, but it is pretty low from this particular site.

In magazines I see competitions where you have to answer questions based on information contained in an ad, this is another way to stop people ignoring your ads.

Has anyone else got ideas or experience of this way of marketing ?