Monthly Archives: August 2009

Google AdWords Review

Google AdWordsI have been using Google AdWords for some time now and as I promisted here is my full review.

I started using the service back in June and when Google sent me a letter with a £50 credit if I signed up so I thought Why not it’s free. Well apart from the minimum of £10 I had to deposit to cover a £5 administration fee.

The ads started to show up within minutes of completing the account activation.

You get 2 options to make payments postpay or prepay, I went to prepay to keep control and so when the £60 credit runs out the ads will stop showing up.

There are also two account types, standard and starter, the starter account is where I started. It allows you simple control over your ads and lets you advertise one product/service.  Both accounts are free and if you start on the starter you can upgrade to the startard later for no extra fee.

So does advertising drive traffic, yes. But does that traffic then drive more revenue, yes and no. I did notice a small rise in money been generated but it’s no where near enough to cover the cost of the AdWords campaign. However I don’t run this site to make money if I make half the cost of hosting back I’m lucky.

Each click costs around £0.15 when biding is set to auto with a monthly budget of £20.

My final thoughts on this matter are yes advertising works, but I knew that already, and in order to make it effective you have to be selling a product, but I also knew that.

I didn’t tryout AdWords to make more money or drive traffic I just wanted to play around and make the mistakes before I want to start a real advertising campaign

Facebook for iPhone 3.0

Facebook’s new iPhone app was submitted to the app store early Sunday morning and today details of what it includes have started to trickle out.

Let’s start with the latest news to come out, what’s new:

  • See all your upcoming event and RSVP to them
  • See your friends birthdays
  • see pages and update the pages you own
  • Write and read notes from your friends
  • Upload videos (iPhone 3GS only)
  • Upload photos to any album and complete photo managment
  • Like photos and posts
  • Get a full news feed
  • Search for people and pages
  • Make friend requests and become a fan of pages
  • Call and text your friends
  • and more

Joe Hewitt, the guy that created the app also posted some screen shots of the app in action.


Hosting with Squarespace

I recently moved from a self hosted WordPress install to Squarespace for a move reliable hosting experience and I chose Squarespace for the ease of use, reliable grid style hosting and speed.

However this move did come at a price, previously I had email included with my Godaddy hosting but with Squarespace no email is provided. There is a simple free solution to this, Google Apps provide free email, calendar, docs and sites to people with their own domain. Which is a barging as before I only had email with 10MB of space per account now I have all the features of GMail with 7GB of space per account.

The other things I lose is the ability to write and test custom PHP code. My solution, as none of this code is ever intending to be public I setup a LAMP stack on an old computer I had kicking around which provides me with a much more secure way to test projects knowing no one can find the pre-release version before I’m ready.

The move also brought the one strong point that made my decision, the most powerful WYSIWYG editor I’ve ever used. Not only does the Squarespace editor produce very nice, clean code for the page contents it also allows me to edit every aspect of the sites theme.

The Squarespace solution also allows me to forget about back ups and maintenance as the guys over there do it all for me. Now that’s big and lets me concentrate on running my site not the server and this plus the brilliant WYSIWYG editor only costs about $2 more than I was paying before.

Why I moved to Squarespace?

I am currently in the process of moving from a self-hosted WordPress install to Squarespace for a number of reasons and the main one is reliability. I used to host my WordPress install on Godaddy and loved it at first but lately I noticed the site was going down a lot and when it was up it was slow and all most unusable.

The other reasons for the move are for easy of use, less headaches and late nights up coding.

Although Squarespace costs more I feel it’s worth it for the above mentioned points and this may seem mad but I’m also going to be running less ads, just one Google ad in the sidebar. This is because I don’t run this site to make money the only reason I run ads here is to get back a little something for the time and money put in.

All the content on the old site will be lost as I don’t plan on bringing any of it forward, yes I am taking this opportunity to start from scratch with a nice clean database and system to keep things speedy.

Review: MarsEdit

MarsEdit.pngMarsEdit is a popular desktop blog creation tool on Mac (Similar to Windows Live Writer on Windows). The advantages of using a desktop editor are mostly the ability to work offline and use the full power of the desktop environment.

While they don’t do everything the web interface of your blog does they do the main thing, writing posts, very well.

MarsEdit Screen.pngSo what does MarsEdit do to make it so popular, well for a start its fast, cheap and powerful through the extensive support for AppleScript. It also ties into Flickr so you can include pictures from (and upload to) your library instantly. They also allow you to browse media you’ve uploaded to your server so you don’t need to upload duplicates. And yet there’s more because it’s on the desktop it will do both spelling and grammar checking as you type, easy most modern browsers will do this for you but hey.

MarsEdit Preview.pngBut if you really want to use it to unleash the full power of desktop publishing you should take time to build a template that matches your site and the live preview really comes into its own if you have a big enough screen.

The thing that makes MarsEdit special for me is its one of the few desktop publishers that I’ve tried that supports the blogging platforms tags as well as Technorati’s.

I do especially like the way it handles multiple blogs arranging them like mail boxes allowing me to quickly and easily switch back and forth.

MarsEdit Post.pngMy only real criticism is that everything needs to be wrote in HTML. This is not a problem for me as a web developer but for a basic user this isn’t good.

Will I continue to use it? Yes, for the rest of my 30 day trial I definitely will, but after that I’m not sure.

There’s no doubt for straight forward publishing its perfect for the job. I’ve got some more testing to do with some more advanced stuff before I decide if it’s worth putting down the $30 for it or if the web interface will serve just as good for my use.

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