• Robots.txt – Control The Robots That Crawl Your Sites

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Search Engine Optimization, WebDesign | Response: 0

    By writing a structured text file you can indicate to robots that certain parts of your server are off-limits to some or all robots. It is best explained with an example:

    # robots.txt file for general use on web servers.

    User-agent: webcrawler
    Disallow:

    User-agent: googlebot
    Disallow: /

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /cgi-bin
    Disallow: /logs
    The first line, starting with ‘#’, specifies a comment.

    The first paragraph specifies that the robot called ‘webcrawler’ has nothing disallowed: it may go anywhere.

    The second paragraph indicates that the robot called ‘googlebot’ has all relative URLs starting with ‘/’ disallowed. Because all relative URL’s on a server start with ‘/’, this means the entire site is closed off.

    The third paragraph indicates that all other robots should not visit URLs starting with /cgi-bin or /log. Note the ‘*’ is a special token, meaning “any other User-agent”; you cannot use wildcard patterns or regular expressions in either User-agent or Disallow lines.

    Two common errors:

    Wildcards are not supported: instead of ‘Disallow: /tmp/*’ just say ‘Disallow: /tmp’.
    You shouldn’t put more than one path on a Disallow line (this may change in a future version of the spec)
    Ultimately, without the use of robots.txt files on your servers/domains, you are risking a variety of potential problems including, unauthorized access to your cgi directory, unauthorized viewing of your site stats, possible spamming of the search engines by accidental crawling of doorway pages.

    One distinct advantage however of having a robots.txt file on your server is that, quite simply, you will be able to tell when and where your site has been indexed or potentially indexed as, all robots will automatically call for the robots.txt file BEFORE any other page on your server so, as long as you keep an eye open for any calls of this file, you can see who is knocking at your site for indexing purposes.

    Below is a robots.txt example that you can copy and paste into a text document to use on your own server:

    <!–Start Copy Below This Line–>

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /cgi-bin
    Disallow: /logs

    <!–End Copy Above This Line–>

    The above will allow all spiders to crawl all of your site except the subdirectory’s ‘cgi-bin’ and ‘logs’ which, may be altered to suit any subdirectory’s you do not wish the spiders to crawl on your server.

    Article written by Lee

  • 10 Ways To Promote Your Site

    Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

    As we all know, getting productive traffic to your site can be a long and tedious task of course, there are ways to generate ‘optimized’ traffic at very little cost and time involvement. Below are just a few suggestions about how you can increase traffic to your
    site and, inevitably, there are hundreds of different variations of these that will work for your site, I think the key to getting a successful traffic source is dependant on how much effort you put into it and, if you work hard and play little, you will reap the benefits tenfold.

    1. Create an email discussion list. The list should be related to your web site’s subject. Place your ad on all posts and it will remind people to visit your site.

    2. Prove your site is a bargain. Add a lot of free stuff to your offer or, if you’ve sold the product for a higher price before, show them the difference or, show them how much your competitors charge.

    3. Make your web site more useful. Sell ad space, generate hot leads, answer visitor questions, offer free content, be news friendly, etc.

    4. Make the most of each visitor. Sometimes your price is to high. You should provide a variety of similar products at different price ranges.

    5. Test and redesign your banner ads till you get your desired click through rate. Once you do, join many banner exchanges and buy ad space.

    6. Use holidays as a reason to get free publicity. Write a press release or article about the current holiday. It’ll have a high chance of being published.

    7. Utilize the free content on the internet. Publish one article on a single web page and your main web site link then upload it as a doorway page.

    8. Test your new products on the bottom of your home page. You don’t want to take away hits from your best selling products until others are proven.

    9. Make commissions without joining an affiliate program. Just propose a joint venture offer to web sites that don’t have affiliate programs.

    10. Persuade other web sites to link to yours. It can improve your search engine ranking. Just offer them something of value in return.

    Article written by Lee.

  • Marketing Campaigns – Testing Your Variables

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

    Irrespective of the medium, an online advertising campaign needs to be tested and optimized constantly in order to provide you with the optimum results. This is where advertising testing can play an important role in your marketing strategy. Despite the advantages to testing your online marketing campaigns, relatively few companies actually go out of their way to see what what works, what doesn’t and, more importantly, why.

    Steps To Testing Your Ad Campaign.

    1) Set expectations as to how you envisage your campaign to perform. This in itself will guide you’re optimization methods. An example of this is, if you expect your ad medium to get a 15% click thru rate or a, 10% conversion rate, you have justification in making adjustments to your campaign if the creative you are using does not perform to your level of expectation.

    2) Don’t get tied into a campaign, If you are going to be purchasing an advertising campaign on a resource site, ensure you have an ‘out clause’. This out clause will enable you to terminate the campaign as long as it has run for a set amount of time, usually, many resources will be happy to give you an out clause especially, if after testing your marketing materials, the results you were hoping for have still not shown themselves.

    3) Consider the variables in your ad campaign, usually, webmasters only think of the one variable in their advertising campaign – Price. However, there are many more variables to be looked at for example, if you are doing a mail drop, the subject line of the email, format and, copy text of the email body itself, all of these things can have a drastic effect on any given advertising campaign, at any given time and often, these can, and most probably will, fluctuate from site to site where you are purchasing ad space.

    4) Stats tracking, tracking your campaign makes it easier to test and review how your advertising medium is working for you, many sites offer live stats for your ad campaigns however, some still do not, where this isn’t a problem in itself as, most companies you choose to advertise with will be more than happy to provide you with statistics as and when you need them after all, you are paying for their services and support.

    5) Pull the plug on campaigns that are not performing, however, ensure you have changed your creative several times before doing so, often, you will find a simple change such as a new creative can drastically increase your marketing efforts. Also, do not just pull advertising as you feel like it, if your campaign has only been active for a week, don’t expect hundred / thousands of hits instantly, often it takes webmasters a while to realize there are new ad mediums running on the sites they visit so often.

    Online Advertising – Review.

    By constantly assessing and testing your advertising campaigns you can pull some interesting figures which can help you long term however, don’t rush into pulling campaigns that you have only just started. Give it a few days, change your copy text and creatives and, if that doesn’t work talk to the company, they will be able to offer you advice and help on improving your sales from your advertising medium after all, they want to keep your business.

    Article written by Lee

  • Why Have More Than One Index Page?

    Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Search Engine Optimization | Response: 0

    The first thing you should do when you start designing a web site is to create an index page. You would think that this is a basic knowledge in web design, but I still encounter web sites that are lacking in this.

    If there’s no index page, and if the web host server has not set a directory access limitation, any visitor will see a directory listing of all the images, html pages, CGI-scripts, and other files in the directory. Everything will then be accessible for reading and downloading, and the CGI-scripts will also be executable!

    So, for a basic security it is most important to have an index page in all your directories, whether they contain only pictures or garbage. In the directories that are private or containing things other then HTML pages, the index pages need only to print out a text like “access forbidden” or something in that spirit. In the directories containing one or more HTML pages, one of the pages must be named “index.html,” whether it is a page with real content or for security reason.

    If you have a directory specifically for CGI-scripts, it will run a higher security risk, because most of the times these directories are called CGI-bin, or a variant of that, and anyone who is after your scripts is undoubtedly familiar with this and can access the directory by typing the directory name in the targeted site’s URL, if it’s not properly protected by an index page. Imagine the horror when someone uses your mailing list program to Spam all your subscribers or decides to sell your email list. It’s quite a big business in selling email lists. A large email list is worth thousands of US dollars nowadays.

    I could have done all these things if I had any bad intentions when I accidentally bumped into an unprotected site. Actually, I bumped into two unprotected, huge subscribers lists in the last two months, which prompted me to write this article. But of course, I did the proper thing and emailed the web sites’ webmasters about their oversight. You would think that these professional looking and operating web sites with email lists of respectively 8,000 and 15,000 subscribers would know better.

    Even if your site is made by a web design company, make sure all your directories are protected. In fact, one of the two unfortunate web sites I uncovered is a web design company. So, check out your site for this unnecessary security gap, right now.

    Article written by Lee

  • What On Earth Is CGI?

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

    Let’s unlock a little bit of the mystery about something called CGI. If it helps any, CGI means Common Gateway Interface.

    This is a method which is used to swap data between the server (the hardware and software that actually allows you to get to your web site) and a web client (your browser). CGI is actually a set of standards where a program or script (a series of commands) can send data back to the web server where it can be processed.

    Typically, you use standard HTML tags to get data from a person, then pass that data to a CGI routine. The CGI routine then performs some action with the data.

    Some of the more common uses of CGI include:

    Guest books – The CGI routine is responsible for accepting the data, ensuring it is valid, sending an email acknowledgement back to the writer, perhaps sending an email to the webmaster, and creating the guest book entry itself.

    Email Forms – A simple CGI forms routine just formats the data into an email and sends it back to the webmaster. More complicated routines can maintain a database, send an acknowledgement and validate data.

    Mailing List Maintenance – These routines allow visitors to subscribe and unsubscribe from a mailing list. In this case, the CGI routine maintains a database of email addresses, and the better ones send acknowledgements back to the visitor and webmaster.

    A CGI routine can be anything which understands the CGI standard. A popular CGI language is called PERL, which is simple to understand and use (well, compared to other languages). PERL is a scripting language, which means each time a PERL routine is executed the web server must examine the PERL commands to determine what to do. In contrast, a compiled language such as C++ or Visual Basic can be directly executed, which is faster and more efficient.

    Okay, in a nutshell (and greatly simplified), here’s how it works:

    1) You (the webmaster) specify a form tag which includes the name of the CGI routine.

    2) You create HTML tags which retrieves data from your visitors.

    3) Each of the input tags includes a variable name. The data which is retrieved from the visitor (or directly set if the tag includes the “hidden” qualifier) is placed in the variable name.

    4) When the visitor presses the “submit” button, the CGI routine which was specified in the form tag is executed. At this time, the CGI routine “takes control”, meaning the browser essentially is waiting for it to complete.

    5) This CGI routine can get data from variable names. It retrieves the data and does whatever action is required.

    6) When the CGI routine finishes, it returns control back to the browser.

    Some important things to remember about CGI routines:

    You can install CGI routines on your own site if your host allows it http://www.webair.com is an example of a web host which allows for CGI routines. Some web hosts do not allow you to install your own routines but do provide some pre-written ones to you. If these are not sufficient for your needs, you can find a remote hosting service to provide the necessary functions.

    Generally, if you install your own routines they must be installed in the cgi-bin directory of your site. This is a special location which allows scripts and programs to be executed.

    CGI routines work best on Apache-style servers. Windows NT and Windows 2000 does support CGI, but it tends to be slow and problematic.

    If you use a remote hosting service, you must remember that although they appear to be giving you this for free, you are actually paying a price. Usually they want to display advertisements, although some of them actually take visitors away from your site.

    When you write a CGI routine, you have the choice of a scripting language like PERL or a compiled language such as C++ or Visual Basic. Anything which can execute on the web server is acceptable.

    I hope this short introduction to CGI has cleared up some of the mystery.

    Article written by Lee

  • Moving To A New Hosting Company

    Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Hosting | Response: 0

    Moving to a new hosting provider does not have to be a frustrating task if done properly.

    Adult webmasters usually have to upgrade their hosting services once their respective Web sites become popular, usually because their current host cannot provide an effective level of scalability or technical support or, perhaps even the cost of bandwidth becomes to high.

    In order to transfer service efficiently, in the event that it becomes necessary, webmasters should ensure that all their content, including Web pages, databases and scripts, are properly archived.

    You should always back up your data at regular intervals in case of unexpected data loss or hardware failure. Ensure that all data is archived recursively. This will ensure that all your data is archived and compressed in its original directories, which is very important if you want to retain the full working integrity of your Web sites.
    You may also find that your new hosting company may be able to transfer the files directly from your old server to the new one you are getting with them, ask before hand if this is something that they can do for you as it is generally a lot quicker for them to do it than for you to upload the files yourself for instance, Web Air will do this work for you.

    Once you have recursively archived your site, make arrangements to purchase your new hosting services. Make sure that any new solution you select includes basic services that approximate and excel the service that you where obtaining with your previous hosting provider. It makes no sense to replace your present hosting service with another Web hosting solution that equally cannot fulfill your technical or financial requirements.

    The best resource to use to find a better hosting firm specific to the adult hosting industry is Adult Hosting Companies, the largest adult Web hosting resource directory with currently over 250 hosts listed.

    Once your new solution is activated, upload your archived Web pages, database and scripts to the new host. You will be allocated an IP number from the new hosting company. Take time to debug and test the new site from the individual IP number, not forgetting things like your cgi scripts may need altering.

    Once your site is entirely debugged and you verify that all site functionality is operative, then transfer your domain name service (DNS) servers over from your old server to your new server.

    During this DNS transition period, which is referred to as the “propagation period,” your Web site will be resolved by both your new and old host, as the new DNS information about your Web site filters through the Internet globally. It typically takes about 10 days for the transfer to fully propagate around the Internet; so keep your old site running in case you get visitors whose ISP’s have cached your site on the old server.

    It is important however that you retain both your old and new hosting services during your propagation period of 10 days. You will need to check your e-mail from both hosting providers since different regions of the Internet will remit e-mail to your original host while other regions will remit mail to the new server during this time.

    Once a week or two have elapsed, cancel the account with the previous hosting company. Only cancel your old account when e-mail stops arriving from your old hosting provider.

    If you follow these steps carefully, then your host change should be easy and stress free.

    Article written by Lee

  • Why Cant I Get Indexed By The Search Engines?

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Search Engine Optimization | Response: 0

    Unfortunately, this is an all too common question. If it makes you feel any better, you’re not the only one frustrated about the length of time it takes to be indexed, or the many pitfalls involved. It often takes anywhere from two days to as much as six months to be listed on a search engine. For example, last month Excite finally updated its index for the first time since last August! Luckily, Excite is the most extreme case lately, but waiting several weeks to a month can also be extremely frustrating especially when your livelihood depends partly on these search engines.

    The Web Position Submitter report will give you current time estimates for each engine so you’ll know what to expect. However, an engine at any time could choose to delay their indexing beyond the “norm” for maintenance or other reasons. On the flip side, you could get lucky and submit just a couple days before an engine does a complete refresh of their database. Therefore, submission times can never be an exact science since we’re all ultimately at the mercy of the engine.

    If you’ve submitted your site and have waited the estimated time to be indexed and there’s still no listing, what do you do now?

    Here are 16 tips that should help you solve this problem:

    1. First, be sure you’re not already indexed but just don’t know it. Unfortunately, none of the major engines are kind enough to e-mail or notify you as to if and when you’ve been indexed.

    The method to determine if a page or domain has been indexed varies from one engine to another, and in many cases, it’s difficult to tell for sure. Never assume that you’re not indexed just because you searched for a bunch of keywords and you never came up in the first few pages of results. You could be in there but buried near the bottom.

    In addition, it’s not very practical to check the status of a number of pages on each major engine each week. Fortunately, Web Position has a URL verification feature in the Reporter that makes this process much easier. Each time you run a mission, it will report which URLs exist and do not exist in each engine. If you’re using Web Position and are not finding your URLs after submitting, be sure to see this page for common pitfalls to watch out for:

    http://www.webposition.com/urlnotfoundhelp.htm

    2. Make sure you have uploaded the pages to your site before submitting them. This one seems obvious, but submitting a page that does not exist or submitting with a subtle typo in the URL is a goof we might all make at one time or another. If you’re using Web Position’s Submitter, there’s a checkbox on tab 2 that forces Web Position to verify that all your URLs are valid before submitting them.

    3. If you have information inside frames, that can cause problems with submissions. It’s best if you can create non-framed versions of your pages. You should then submit the non-frames versions of your pages which can of course point to your framed Web site. Alternatively, you can enter your relevant text within the NOFRAMES area of a framed page which most search engine spiders will read.

    4. Search engine spiders cannot index sites that require any kind of registration or password. A spider cannot fill out a form of any kind. The same rule applies regarding indexing of content from a searchable database, because the spider cannot fill out a form to query that database. The solution is to create static pages that the engines will be able to find.

    5. Dynamic pages often block spiders. In fact, any URL containing special symbols like a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) will be ignored by many engines.

    6. Most engines cannot index text that is embedded in graphics. Text that appears in multimedia files (audio and video) cannot be indexed by most engines. Information that is generated by Java applets or in XML coding cannot be indexed by most engines.

    7. If your site has a slow connection or the pages are very complex and take a long time to load, it might time out before the spider can index all the text. For the benefit of your visitors and the search engines, limit your page size to less than 60K. In fact, most Webmasters recommend that your page size plus the size of all your graphics should not exceed 50K-70K. If it does, many people on dial up connections will leave before the page fully loads.

    8. If you submit just your home page, don’t expect a search engine to travel more than one or two links away from the home page or the page that you submitted. Over time they may venture deeper into your site, but don’t count on it. You’ll often need to submit pages individually that appear further down into your site or have no link from the home page.

    9. If your Web site fails to respond when the search engine spider pays a visit, you will not be indexed. Even worse, if you are indexed and they pay a visit when your site is down, you’ll often be removed from their database! Therefore, it pays to have a reliable hosting service that is up 99.5% of the time. However, at some point a spider is going to hit that other 0.5% and end up yanking your pages by mistake. Therefore, it pays to keep a close eye on your listings.

    10. If you have ever used any questionable techniques that might be considered an overt attempt at spamming (i.e., excessive repetition of keywords, same color text as background, or other things that the Web Position Page Critic warns you about), an engine may ignore or reject your submissions. If you’re having trouble getting indexed in the expected amount of time, make sure your site is spam-free.

    11. If your site contains redirects or meta refresh tags these things can sometimes cause the engines to have trouble indexing your site. Generally they will index the page that it is redirecting TO, but if it thinks you are trying to “trick” the engine by using “cloaking” or IP redirection technology, there’s a chance that it may not index the site at all.

    12. If you’re submitting to a directory site like Yahoo, Open Directory, NBCI.com, LookSmart, or others, then a human being will review your site. They must decide the site is of sufficient “quality” before they will list it. I recommend you read the submission guide on the directory tab of the WebPosition Submitter. It contains tips to improve your chances of obtaining a good listing on these directories.

    13. A number of engines no longer index pages residing on many common free web hosting services. The common complaint from the engines is that they get too many “junk” or low-quality submissions from free web site domains. Therefore, they often choose not to index anyone from those domains or they limit submissions from them. It’s always best to buy your own domain name (very important) and place it on a respected, paid hosting service to avoid being discriminated against.

    14. Some engines have been known to drop pages that cannot be traveled to from the home page. HotBot has been rumored to do this. You may want to consider submitting your home page that links either directly or indirectly to your doorway pages.

    15. Make sure you’re submitting within the recommended limits. Some engines do not like more than a certain number of submissions per day for the same domain. If you exceed the limit, you may find that all your submissions are ignored. Fortunately, WebPosition’s submitter will warn you regarding current limits and recommend you stay within them. Some submission consultants feel it is dangerous to submit more than ONE page a day to a engine for a given Web site. For those who wish to be ultra-conservative in their approach, the Web Position Submitter includes a checkbox to limit submissions to one URL per day per engine.

    16. Last but not least, sometimes the engines just lose submissions at random through technical errors and bugs. Therefore, some people like to resubmit once or twice a month for good merit in case they do lose a submission. Certainly if you’ve followed all the “rules” and are still not listed, re-submit! Sometimes a little persistence is all that’s needed.

    If any of the above scenarios apply to your submission, you should make the necessary adjustments and re-submit. If that still does not work, you should consider e-mailing or calling the search engine and asking them politely why you have not been indexed yet. Sometimes they will reply back with “Sorry, there was a problem with our system and I’ve now made sure you’ll be indexed within the next couple days.” Or, sometimes they’ll tell you why you were not indexed. In other cases, they will ignore your e-mail and you’ll have to keep e-mailing or calling them until they respond. Still, it’s definitely worth the effort to get your site listed with the major engines assuming you also take the time to optimize your pages so you’ll achieve top rankings.

    Article written by Lee

  • Adult Webmaster Conventions

    Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

    Networking Overload

    Adult Webmaster Conventions – Networking Overload.

    As the industry changes more and more another thing that has been overdone to the extreme in recent times is that of the webmaster convention, there used to be two or three of these webmaster conventions a year with the biggest being the Internext Expo – Las Vegas. Now however it seems there isn’t a month that goes by without a new webmaster convention being announced.

    Webmaster Networking.

    Adult Webmaster Conventions however offer all types of webmaster (for the most part) something useful, interaction with other webmasters in a relaxing and friendly atmosphere however, with so many of these conventions to choose from how do you judge which of the monthly shows you should attend and, which of the shows you should not?

    Webmaster Shows – The Top Three.

    In all honesty and, remember these are my own feelings based on attendance at a variety of shows over the last four years I would say if you stick to the main shows then you cant really go wrong, so the must attend shows list from me would include the following.

    Internext Expo – Las Vegas – January.
    Phoenix Forum – Arizona – April.
    Internext Expo – Florida – August.

    By attending all three of these shows you will get the opportunity to not only meet the people and companies you have been doing business with but, also get to meet new webmasters to further develop your business from a range of levels including new webmasters right up to the industry old timers.

    Webmaster Conventions Advice.

    When you consider attending your first adult webmaster convention you should keep one thing in mind, the shows themselves can often be costly so far as airfares and hotel accommodations so, you should book early to enable you to plan your budget for the shows and, also to ensure that you get the best deals available.

    Many of the larger shows are held in hotels such as The Venetian in Las Vegas which is directly next door to the convention center itself as is the Doubletree La Posada at the Phoenix Forum and the Westin Diplomat at the Florida show however, don’t be afraid of booking a hotel down the block from the one where the show is actually being held, often you will find people staying at hotels outside of the convention location and this means you can often relax with them away from the hustle and bustle of the show itself.

    Webmaster Conventions Overview.

    With so many webmaster conventions being held each year one thing is for certain, webmaster want to network at new places and often, these conventions can yield more business by themselves than a simple phone call or email however, be careful of the conventions or parties you choose to attend, just because a lot of people appear to be going to a specific party, it dos not mean you will get any business done there, choose your webmaster show attendance wisely and more importantly, make sure you have a set list of goals to achieve once you actually get to the convention itself.

    Article written by Lee.

  • Community Forum Scripts

    Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Scripts | Response: 0

    Whether you have little or much traffic one thing that will enable you to benefit greater form this traffic is giving your surfers the sense that they are part of a ‘community’ much like the message boards built around adult webmasters have the feel of a community to them your surfers will end up staying around a lot longer if you can give them a reason to come back to your site over anyone else’s.

    That said, one of the main factors in starting your own little porn community is the need to have a place where all the ‘action’ take place. What better way than you own message forum.

    However, we hit our first problem, having never thought about starting a forum up before you wouldn’t know where to go to look for scripts or, what the best one is. That’s the reason behind this little guide.

    Below you will find a short breakdown of the more commonly used message forum scripts along with a short list of features each one has to offer you when choosing to build your own online community.

    VBulletin http://www.vbulletin.com

    This is actually quite a good forum script, most of the main forums on the web use either VBulletin or PhpBB when it comes to threaded forums. VBulletin uses MySQL and .php to run the actual forum and, set-up of it can become a little tricky if you want to customize it to your exact needs and color scheme. That said, once you overcome the initial complications in setting the forum script up it is easy to handle and, with a price tag of only $160.00 its an affordable option for many.

    Ultimate Bulletin Board http://www.infopop.com

    Unlike VBulletin UBB uses Perl programming for the forum script which, means you can install it on any cgi enabled host. However, the one main drawback with this script is that it uses flat text files to store all the data which, can sometimes bog down your server with unnecessary file calls. The cost of $199.00 however can be a bit to expensive for most webmasters.

    Ikon Board http://www.ikonboard.com

    Ikon board is a nice little threaded forum script and, the fact that it is free to download makes it even more so however, even though it uses MySQL for the backend or, choose to store your data in flat text files this script just seems a little to ‘basic’ looking for my personal taste. That said, there are many types of site using IkonBoard so the script must be good enough for them to be using it. Then again, maybe its the price tag of $0.00 that has made this a popular choice.

    PhpBB http://www.phpbb.com

    PhpBB is probably the most well known free forum script on the web today, its easy to customize (within reason) supports php and MySQL functions yet seems to offer nothing in return. The basics of a forum are there however, every webmaster and their closest friend seems to be using this script. The whole idea of building up a community is so that your site can stand out from the crowd, in my humble opinion, the script does what it is supposed to but, it doesn’t offer any redeeming qualities to your site.

    Site Net BBS http://www.focalmedia.net

    Sitenet BBS, formally known as Netboard, is probably one of the better Perl based forum scripts on the market, it price tag of $69.00 makes it an affordable choice for almost everyone and, the installation process itself is VERY simple to understand. The one drawback that i have found with this forum script however is that it stores the data in flat text file which actually slow the server down quite a lot making connections to the forum time-out on numerous occasions. However customization of the script is very easy using only HTML based templates you do not need any additional programming skills and, it has a nice interface with a few good features. For the price it is well worth a look. They also offer a freeware version however the links on the bottom of the forum become annoying after a while.

    In summary there are a lot of popular forum scripts available for webmasters to start using some are free other require payment ALL have a range of different functions available in them.

    Before looking at installing any of the scripts you should always try a demo first to see which one has the features and benefits you would like to offer your community members.

    If you can get your base community built up on a forum they enjoy using then all the rest of your marketing should pay off in dividends long term.

    Article written by Lee.

  • Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 2

    Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

    In the last tutorial we hopefully got the foundations of our surfer trap laid and in this stage, we will start to put this thing together.

    Ok the first step of stage two of building your surfer trap is to start linking each of the individual FPA’s to your Multi-Site FPA.

    The easiest way that I have found to do this is to give each FPA its own sub directory on your server and have the html page named index for each of the single site FPA’s.

    So for instance, if you have the site All Petite on your Multi-Site FPA you would link it to:

    mydomain.com/all-petite/

    Or whatever you called the sub directory for the All Petite single FPA.

    Now, once you have linked these single FPA’s to your Multi-Site FPA we need to start ‘playing’ with them once again.

    You should now have copy’s of your single site FPA’s and Multi-Site FPA on both your server and Hard Drive.

    Take the copy’s you have on your hard drive and add a small NICHE pop up console to each of the single site FPA’s AND the Multi-Site FPA.

    I would suggest making 6 NICHE consoles.

    These consoles should be pure text and nothing else.

    Each of the links on this small console should link to a different niche of your single site FPA’s I usually go with one link for each of the following niches…

    Gay
    Mature
    Teen
    Fetish
    Hardcore
    Asian

    Plus, I usually add a link at the bottom of my console which goes to the POTD program.

    Once you have these consoles built you should upload them to their OWN sub directory on your server, I would suggest calling this directory ‘consoles’ and calling each of the niche consoles the name of the NICHE they represent.

    So, you should now have the following on your HD and on your server:

    1 Multi-Site FPA
    50 or so Single Site FPA’s (All Linked From The Multi-Site FPA)
    6 Small Pop-Up Consoles (Popping Only One On The Multi-Site FPA and The Single Site FPA’s, each different niche Single Site FPA pops a different niche console however.)

    You now have to check that your surfer trap is working so far.

    Article written by Lee.

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