I originally started the site back in late 2003, and it’s had 2 makeovers since.

It’s actually fun going on the Wayback Machine, to see how the layout and content has changed over the years. I’ve finally gone away from the green colour scheme that seemed to be a fallback for a few of my sites.

Surprisingly, there hasn’t been much change to the content. Back in 2003 I was teaching myself SEO, and the trend back then was hyphenated domain names and filenames and reciprocal link exchanges.  So I still have hyphenated domain and filenames – there’s no need to throw away the history, and if someone offered me a nice link that still remains, then I’ll keep it there, as you should.

And my keyword research back then showed that there was less competition for the long-tail phrases like “floral emblems of Australia“, than initial seaches like “flowers”.

It was easy to rank on Yahoo using hyphenated names, and I would get regular organic traffic from there and MSN. Google was always a hard nut to crack.

But despite the amount of time that I spend researching SEO and web development, with a normal job during the week, plus a couple of kids and dogs, I never really spent much time refining the site.

So recently I decided to try and vamp it up.

Being lazy, I bought Confession of a Lazy Internet Marketer, and was surprised to find that I was already doing 80% of the content and structure approach that he suggested.  Way back in 2003.

So as usual it comes down to SEO.  Some of his techniques I won’t use, in the link exchange area – I don’t feel like getting an ongoing paid membership to a linking site. But some of his other techniques for SEO are quite good. It’s interesting how they also overlap with some of the techniques used in 30 minute backlinks, which I also bought recently. So I will be using some of their techniques that they have in common. I think the 30 minute backlinks suggestions are easier for less technical people.

But I haven’t actually done any of their suggestions yet. I’m about halfway through preparing the groundwork.  So my Google rankings still need a lot of work.

And now I’m about to go out to a door shop, cos I really need to fix up the bottom room – it’s too crowded and dog oriented, and needs simplicity and lightening up.
Like a lot of websites I know.

One day the site will be finished. And then I can go on and revamp some more websites.

34 rules for the maverick entrepreneur. Running a business can and should be fun.

http://www.maverickbusinessinsider.com/

When you see some of the images generated by Apophysis at Techrepublic , you’ll understand why.

There are lots of images on the post for you to click through.

So I checked out the well-known Gallery2. But it needed a MySQL database. I have already used up my database allowance at my hosting account, with this blog, my Sydney Photos site, and I’ve planned the other for a separate Christmas function.

So I ended up with TinyWebGallery, an XML-based photo gallery. I’ve installed it as my Christmas Decorations Photo Gallery, but despite all the traffic to the site (currently only page 1 at Google, and page 2 at Yahoo, although it used to be #1 at both), no one has sent me any photos yet. It really just has some photos of the Christmas windows at David Jones in the city, that I took with my camera phone. So I need some more.

I had a few hiccups installing the free open-source PHP program. I installed it, and it didn’t work. Then the next day, it did come up, but admin didn’t work. Then the next day, admin did work. I still haven’t got the basic login functions working, but I can upload photos, and people can view and page through the site, so that’s enough for now. It was a big help manually deleting the cached photos from the cache folder.

Check it out.