During the week I have a regular job and I have little time for my online business.  It is a hobby of sorts for me, so I am forced to work on it on the evenings and weekends.

On the weeknights, I spend my time promoting my sites.  The reason I do it this way is that I only have an hour or two each night, so that limits the time that I can spend on them.

But on the weekends, it is a different story.  I can sit at the computer for a few hours each day, which gives me ample time to create new web designs.  It helps that I have some quick and easy web design software to make the complex task of creating layouts much easier.

In fact, I depend on the JavaScript menu builder in the software to create my menus as having good site navigation is one of the most important things that a website needs.

On that note, I should get back to work.  I only have a couple more hours before I need to do chores and I need to get this work done.

I had someone try to place an order using her Blackberry several months ago. It didn’t work quite right and the order didn’t go all the way through.  I hadn’t ever though of using a phone or mobile device to order products from the Internet because I don’t use my own phone to do this.

It has had me thinking though since then and wondering if a site looks the same on a phone as it does on a computer. Are there actually mobile websites that are designed and made specially for this purpose?

Yep, there are. I still don’t know much about it but I did find some information on wap sites.
Apparently a website designed for viewing on a computer screen won’t show up the same way on a mobile device and I’m not too surprised.

Now, I’ll have to figure out if it’s worth adding this type of thing to my own regular website.

Over the past few months, money has been a little tight and my web business has suffered.  You see, I operate a site dedicated to work at home dads on the DotNetNuke platform.  Switching over to that CMS system has been a blessing for my site, with the traffic and sales that are a lot higher than my expectations.  It has been nice to see the site performing as well as it has.

But things haven’t been all rosy.  You see, over the past six months, I have had eight web hosting providers.  There have been a ton of problems with site uptime, and I have even had a couple of hosting companies just disappear.

It got to the point when I was going to pull the plug, but I tried one last DotNetNuke web hosting company, and then my luck changed.  In fact, things have never been better, and if anyone asks me what company I recommend, I recommend the one that I am using.  They just offer simply better hosting.

With the increase in business that our online division has been experiencing, it is time that we upgrade our shopping cart software to something a little more robust and that can handle the traffic.

Our old ecommerce software solution that we had been using is old and it wasn’t the easiest to work with.  I am not sad to see it go, but at least it has given us an idea of what we are looking for in an ecommerce shopping cart.

So with our requirements in hand, we went to take a look online to see if we could find a solution to our problem.  As it turns out, Aspdotnet had the exact type of software that we were looking for.

I decided to read some reviews of their product and everyone I read said that they were very happy with their software solution.

So, we are going to give it a try, but from what I read, I think that we will be very happy with the software.

I grew up in a small town and I have always wanted to live in the big city.  It could be my childlike fascination with the big lights and sounds that a city offers or it could just be that I want to be part of something larger than myself.  Whatever my inner motivation is, I knew that I wanted to to live the big city life and I just wasn’t sure how I was going to do it.

After completing my college degree in computer science with a minor in graphic arts I found myself with a job in web design.  After getting some experience in my small town I decided to see if I could make my dream of living in a city a reality.

After submitting a number of applications, I was accepted to work at a New York website design studio as a junior designer.  It wasn’t until I stepped foot in my apartment and went to my first day at work that I realized that my dreams of working in a big city finally came true.

While reading one of the daily articles on a blog today, I came across a reference to a well named site focusing on the financial market.  What really got me, was it was one of the most cleverly named sites at ever seen.

Now before you jump to conclusions, it is not some sort of goofy name or one that is inappropriate for the services it offers.  In fact, I would almost say that the name of the site empathizes with the investor who thinks that their advisor only caters to rich clients.

Can you guess what it is?

The name of the site is "Your Money Matters", the result of a great idea by Michael Dinich.  Not only do they provide free advice and information regarding financial and estate planning, but their advice can apply to you no matter what financial situation you find yourself in.

Definitely a smart name for a smart site.

I never realized that my web host provided me with the way to check on the number of visitors that come to my website.  I guess I must’ve missed the fact that they offer website statistics software to help their customers measure and analyze the website traffic their website receives.

So today, I decided that I would take a look at the statistics from the visitors that my website collected to see what I could do to increase my search engine rankings.

Looking through the statistics I found that my website was a little more popular than I had thought, and a lot of my traffic was coming directly from the search engines.  Looking down the page, I noticed that many people were finding me under the search terms that I expected them to, but there are also other phrases that I had not thought of that were driving people to my website.

From now on I think that I will be paying more attention to the statistics in an effort to increase the visitors are coming to my website.

I have been building and selling websites on and off for some time now.  Usually, I can make some pretty easy money when I make these sites, and really it doesn’t take me much time.  I have gotten it to an art of sorts, and my markup is pretty good.

Now, it took me some time to get all the pieces that I needed together to offer this service.  I had to find a place that would let me register cheap domains at a price that was well below the market prices.  This took me some time, and a number of emails to get the price that I was looking for.

Next, I had to find somewhere that offered cheap web hosting.  Now, you might make a comment about cheap hosting, but I was looking for something more: they had to be reliable.  This took a lot more testing before I did find a company to go with, but in the end, I feel that I found an awesome deal.

Last but not least, it took me awhile to find a tool that would help me choose which cheap domain names to register.  I found an invaluable keyword research tool that helps me with my decision on which domain to register for my clients.

Speaking of clients, I should get back to work.  I have a number of orders to fill tonight before I can go to bed.

While I was looking for some good kids websites for my five-year old son the other day, I realized just how many websites there are out there that are filled with just stupid stuff. And it floors me as to how many of these are geared towards little kids.

I made it my mission to find some educational sites for him that would also be fun. I looked up the sites that had the best reviews for his age group. There were many of them and I had to now narrow it down as to what best suited him.

I did find some sites that were full of just cool stuff and I knew that he would be both fascinated and entertained by them. They also had at least a small level of educational material, which is what I was looking for.

I decided on five of them and sat him at the computer to try them out. He thought they were all very cool websites, and definitely picked his favorites very quickly. We bookmarked the ones he really liked and now, visiting the sites is one of his favorite things to do.

Before I started making websites, I found someone that could be my website advisor.  You could think of my advisor as my mentor.  He has a large number of sites and has experience doing what I am trying to accomplish which is an excellent resource for me.

Lately I have been getting advice and paying for SEO services from a search marketing firm.  Now, I won’t name names here, but the results have been less than stellar.  When I mentioned this to Mike (my advisor) he told me that there were more effective methods to promote my sites besides paying someone to do it - and it wasn’t going to be hard at all.

He suggested that I do some keyword research specific to my niche, write some articles, and then submit them to the many article sites that are on the web.  This way, I would get traffic to my sites and I would be building up my reputation as an expert in the field.

Do you know what my first reaction to this was?  It was that it sounded smart - really smart.  That is why I have a mentor - he is the best.