Archive for the 'Uncategorized' category

photo credit: Gaetan Lee

Advertising is a great way to produce a revenue stream out of the visits to your web site, even with a relatively small traffic. But more is not better. Too many ads will shy visitors away and will hide your own content (The real reason visitors come and see your site).

It is a good thing that Google limit publishers to a maximum of 3 ads per page, but they also have good statistics and, if you use ‘channels’, you will be able to detect the most efficient ad locations and ad types. Try several, and keep only a few, the most productive ones. And if Google is more productive than an affiliate program, keep only the best.

You may be thinking that only one or two little things are needed to be a blogger. This is only partly right. You can start small, but I believe that you need more than that to be an efficient blogger or a good blogger. So, I decided to disclose my perfect list of tools. It took me several weeks to assemble it but it’s worth it: You’ll find both free tools and a few more expensive things (but some good they’re worth their price).

Free tools

WordPress

My web sites are nearly always powered by WordPress.

FeedBurner

The motor of my RSS threads, eases the subscription by visitors and help in insertion of some Google advertising.

BlogLines.com

My reader of RSS threads. I keep reading about one hundred RSS threads. You bet I am very organized for efficiency! BlogLines Beta version is really up to the task.

My Yahoo!

I use this RSS thread reader to control pages display on Yahoo!

IrfanView

Really very good at small image modifications (reframing, image format conversion, generating a Favicon.ico icone file, etc.)

Opera 10

Opera is clearly my prefered browser (even if I also test web sites with IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari). I simply love: mouse moves control, excellent tab management, the new version alpha-10 spelling checker.

GNU-Emacs for Windows

It’s been years that I always use GNU-Emacs for file edition (be it for text files, CSS, HTML or PHP). You need to have a driver’s license for it: so many impossible commands. But it’s so powerful. Some people may want to look into VI instead. But I use GNU-Emacs for 100% of my CSS file editing.

OpenOffice

The perfect MS-Office replacement. But it is not often used when preparing a web site. More geared toward written/printed communication and data crunching.

Google Analytics

Simply the best mean to analyze the traffic of one web site (or many).

Putty for Windows

Freeware for Windows that is needed to connect in SSH mode to my web server administration. For low-level handling…

VLC Media player

Simply the best multimedia file reader/player, perfect for DivX, Xvid, MP4, etc. (all video file formats).

Any kind of calendar

To schedule posts publishing.

Commercial software

Adobe Photoshop CS3 & Adobe Bridge CS3

xpensive but nearly perfect to quickly handle illustration pictures. But when the PC is not equipped with Photoshop, I still keep IrfanView (free).

DreamWeaver 3.0

Software rpogram to develop web sites/pages. Even if this is an old version, I keep it for two reasons: a very good Wysiwyg, template management that is bordering on magically excellent.

Here is a subject that has the ability to inflame me: many web sites are “optimised” for a certain screen size. As if it was an intelligent strategy.

On vous explique qu’il faut optimiser pour 640×480 ou 800×600 ou n’importe quoi d’autre. On vous explique combien il faut enlever de pixels pour les bords du navigateur.

Soyons clairs ! Ce ne sont que des c…ries. D’une part, les visiteurs de votre site ne vont pas forcément utiliser leur navigateur en plein écran comme le montre l’étude qui est relayée par Thomas Baekdal. Plus la taille de l’écran est grande plus les visiteurs utilisent une fenêtre -relativement- plus étroite.

D’autre part, il vaut mieux un site qui est capable de s’adapter aux différentes tailles possibles. Y compris les plus petits affichages : qu’en est-il des écran de téléphones portables ? Ces derniers sont de fait, par l’intermédaire des acrobaties des navigateurs portables, rapportés à 980 pixels.

Alors, un bon conseil : votre site doit pouvoir s’afficher utilement sur presque n’importe quoi, y compris les plus petits écrans. Je n’ai pas dit complètement : si la partie droite de votre site disparaît, votre site est-il encore utilisable ? Mieux encore est-il possible de faire un site qui s’adapte à la taille de la fenêtre de navigation ? C’était assez facile avec les structures à base de tables HTML, c’est plus compliqué -mais possible- avec les structures à base de CSS.

Ne laissez pas certains visiteurs à la porte de votre site. Adaptez votre site.

Is it the end of an era or the beginning of a new one?

I created this web site, this blog, tout keep traces of my efforts to create several web sites. While I was already equipped with Roumazeilles.net, I wanted to split some of its contents in several independant sites. My main objective was to maximise the readerhsip (I want more visits) and to maximise the earned money (these sites are a source of revenue through -mainly- advertising).

As it is often told that advertising is quickly diluted when subjects are multiplied (Roumazeilles.net had already more than 100 categories/themas), I wanted to test this hypothesis in a larger scale (larger for me) and I satrting creating several web sites. Since I start from ground, this is the opportunity to practice some of the best SEO principle (Search Engine Optimisation) and to share my own observations, my remarks and my advice with other web site creators. Obviously, some of these are also based upon the experience gained with Roumazeilles.net and a few other web sites receiving from 2000 to 5000 visits per day and bringing me a nice income of about 10% of my Engineering management salary (web site design and maintenance is not my day-to-day job, but a lucrative side activity).

So, along the coming weeks, vous will be able to find my trials (and errors), my advice. If you want to create your own WordPress-based blog, you will notice that since WordPress is also my web site engine, some posts will be specifically targetting it and could be more useful to you (I hope).

Nevertheless, your participation is welcome, by your comments to posts or even the writing of specific articles.