Revenue? Yes please!

This week's evenings were spent sorting out which affiliate programs and adverts that will be displayed on the website. I realised that when banners and adverts are included on the website, it made the site look more 'authentic' i.e. a 'real' website! It also helped with the sparseness of the site, there was too much text and not enough pretty pictures.

Tip 1 - Use advertising banners to brighten up your website. It could (er hem, will!) also provide a revenue stream!

Of course, the advertising should be carefully chosen for a number of reasons -
1. Ascetics - A nice looking website will require an easy on the eye colour scheme. Banners with colours that clash with your colour scheme will detract from your site's visual appeal. Some advertisments (like Google's AdWords) will let you change the colours used by the adverts on your website - use them!
2. Relevance - The advertisments should be relevant to your site's content. In my case, I figure that sites that allow you to rent and buy games (and electronic gadgets won't go amiss) might be of interest to my visitors and will add usefulness to thegamecollective.co.uk.
3. Service quality - It's tempting to join loads of affiliate programs, but I just can't let anyone advertise on my site if I've not made use of the service, and was pleased with it. I want any of the vistors to my site to receive a good quality service all round!

At this moment, the site has a fair few banners on it, and it looks okay - at least it's an improvement on the site's appearance. The banners are in there and working, that's the hard part! I'll now focus on tweaking their appearance...

First entry

Well, here we go. My first ever blog - I never expected to keep a blog but I may have something slightly worth blogging about - a narrative of the construction of a website. Perhaps someone might find this interesting or my experiences in constructing a website - aimed at the masses - worth noting. If someone benefits from what I learn, then all the better!

The website is an online game swapping website (http://www.thegamecollective.co.uk), which I'm creating to help gamers swap their games with other gamers safely, easily and without cost! I'm not intending to charge for the service, it's a project that'll keep my fingers and mind busy - something to do!

I've been working on the site for around 8 months now in what spare time I can find (I'm a full time software developer for a startup in Wakefield, Yorkshire - It's the new milan, you know!). The site is currently published in a basic form - it can accept registrations and users can start swapping now. I'll advertise the site on google adwords in the next few days and am happy to spend around £30 of my own cash on advertising each month - not too much money! The sites design is, erm, poor. That's something I can fix once the guts of the site are working nicely. I expect to start meddling with the design iun around 4-6 weeks time (I was going to write 2 weeks but it's safer to multiply your first estimate by 2 - a safety factor!)

So that's the first blog entry, more to follow as interesting things happen on the website. I only hope people find the site useful....