Windows Vista has been mired in a lot of controversy since it was released.  The short answer to the question posited in the title of this post is no.  But in an effort to help you understand why I’ll spend a little longer and explain why.

1.  Vista doesn’t offer anything compelling (other than shiny graphics) to you when compared to XP.

2.  The shiny new graphics from Vista, the only thing that most users will consider upgraded, eat up a lot of your CPU.  Forget about playing games or anything else that’s graphic intensive unless you have a top of the line (expensive) machine to run Vista.

3.  Most IT departments aren’t switching to Vista, if a company with an IT department refuses to make the switch, you shouldn’t either.

4.  Vista isn’t compatible with a lot of the drivers currently written for your peripherals.  Forget about your 3 year old printer working with it even though all you had to do was plug it into your XP machine and click print.

5.  Vista has an annoying user access control popup every time you install something.  I recognize that this is Microsofts attempt at making Vista more secure than previous versions of Windows.  But it all it does is annoy most users since they don’t have the computer savvy to know that they shouldn’t allow program asdfrsrefdsf.exe to run when they’re trying to install a program.

6.  Vista is expensive.  Really all upgrades on Windows are expensive so save yourself the time and money.

7.  Most computer manufacturers still let you buy a machine from them with XP on it, if you can get it that way you should.

8.  Microsoft is going to continue support for XP well into the release of Windows 7.  You can continue to get updates and patches for XP for a long time, there’s no compelling reason to make the switch.

There’s 8 pretty good reasons to stay with XP, if you can think of anymore let me know.

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It’s a common thing said amongst webmasters, what’s your pagerank?  How do you get your pagerank up?  Indeed, pagerank is an important part of your website.  It helps to determine where your page will rank in search engine results.  It’s a measure of the quality and quantity of links to your site.  But is that the one thing you should be focusing on in your website?

Pagerank is just one of many aspects to your sites health.  It is important, but not the most important thing to work on.  You can have a pagerank 1 or 0 site that gets more traffic and generates more money for you than a higher pagerank site.  You have to look at the niche you’re website is in, and the keywords for your site.  If the keywords are highly searched you’ll likely have a lot of competition and a hard time getting your pagerank up.  But that site will probably get more traffic than one that doesn’t have much competition because the keywords aren’t searched often.

Generating traffic is a combination of things, working on the keywords, the pagerank (building backlinks), and generating unique quality content are what you need to focus on to garner the traffic that you want.

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So you’re an ad publisher, and you work damn hard for the few clicks that you get.  Then you come across another site using the same ads program that you use and they’re obviously violating the TOS for ad placement and color scheme and everything else.  Of course you assume that since their ad placement is so sneaky that their click ratio must sky high.  They’re practically rolling in the money.  You struggle for your measly 2% click ratio and hate that they must have a really high click ratio.  They should be banned, why aren’t they?

When this question crosses your mind, and it will, DO NOT go to the nearest forum and post the website in a thread asking: This site violates TOS, why aren’t they banned?  Threads like that are annoying, and they all have 2 responses (both correct).

The first response you’ll get is that the ad publisher has a lot of clients and it takes time to find sites that violate the TOS and warn/ban them.  This is true too, take googles adsense for instance.  It is published on millions (probably billions) of web pages, there is no way for google to be vigilant enough to comb through each page and make sure it doesn’t violate the TOS.

That’s fine you say, we should all report it so they get banned.  And really, if it bugs you that much go ahead and report it.  I doubt you’ll get many, if any, forum members to report it with you though.  The other response you’ll get from those forum members is that you shouldn’t worry about those other sites that violate the TOS and worry more about making your site more profitable.  You could spend the time you’re worrying about other websites on building links for yours, adding content to yours, checking webstats, etc.

Both forum responses are correct, you won’t find much sympathy on forums, so don’t bother trying to find any.  Instead of fuming over the other sites ad placement work on your own site.  The secret with this is that their click ratio isn’t as good as you think it is.  They go through all the bother of violating the TOS and most of them will sit at a 5-6% click ratio.  Those extra few %s isn’t worth the possibility of being dropped by the thing that makes you money.

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Most registrars for your domain will offer hosting for your domain.  Some will offer free hosting (Godaddy does but with ads at the top) and others not, but most of them will not be great offers.  The hosting offers convenience for you when buying the domain, and they count on you not actually looking at alternatives because it involves some work.  For most people, taking the registrars hosting services will be just fine (even though they’re paying more than they would be if they shopped around).  For some of us though the hosting from the registrar will fall a bit short of what we want/need.

We’ll look at a few different factors for your site when looking at a host.  These include: monthly transfer, number of databases, number of domains, storage space, number of emails, and available stat tracking.

The monthly transfer is the amount of bandwidth you’re allowed to use up with the host.  If you have 50GB of monthly transfer and you use that all up before the month is up then your site will be down for the rest of the month (or the host will charge your credit card overage fees that’ll probably be excessive).  Most websites won’t use that much bandwidth, but if you’re promoting your site on social networks like digg or reddit you could receive a traffic boost that takes your site down.  There are some webhosts that allow you unlimited bandwidth.

The number of databases allowed for a site varies depending on the host.  Most hosts will let you have at least 1, but you should look for more.  If you plan on installing blogging software and forums (or any number of free tools available for creating websites) you’ll need a database for each.

The number of domains allowed sometimes confuses users.  If you buy hosting from the registrar you likely have 1 domain per hosting account.  If you’re not buying domains through the registrar some hosts will let you put multiple domains on your account for the same price.  You could save yourself a lot of money by purchasing a hosting account that you can host many domains on.  Most of the time it’s only a few dollars more to host 5-10 domains than it would be to host just the 1 through your registrar.

Storage is another important factor.  If you have a good host that’ll let you have unlimited transfer and 25 databases but they limit you to only 200 MB of storage on their server your site will quickly grow to be too large for your account.  Many these days will give you hundreds of GBs for storage and a few will give unlimited storage.

Email addresses are only going to be important if you plan on giving a lot of them out.  Most of us don’t have a large userbase that want their own email addresses at yoursite.com but if you do plan on giving a bunch of them out make sure you have a couple hundred at least available from your host.

Stat tracking is possibly the most important part of your hosting package.  The ability to track your websites statistics greatly improves your chances of increasing traffic, pageviews, and earnings.  Knowing which page is viewed most often, and time on the page can help you determine what pages need work, what pages don’t
need work etc.  Look for a host that will give you all the stats you want included in your hosting plan.  Some hosts (godaddy) will charge you extra for access to the important stats for your sites.

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The registrar you use to register your domains isn’t usually something that you spend a lot of time thinking about.  Most people will just search for the cheapest registrar and off they go.  And truth be told, the registrar you use to register your domain probably won’t matter all that much.  But occasionally you will find that the cheapest registrar isn’t always the best to use.

Some registrars will inundate you with offer upon offer to add to your bill.  Then once you’ve signed up with them as a customer they continue to send offers to your email.  Some of them make their user interface difficult to use so that you have to click through a lot of pages to find what you want.  Every page will have some kind of advertising on it so it’s a way for them to increase their ads visibility.

Worse yet some will buy up domains from under your nose as you’re searching for it.  They’ll monitor how popular a domain is in the searches and then while you’re in the process of trying to buy it they’ll snatch it up with an automated system.  Knowing that the domain is sought after they’ll try to offer it to you for the low low price of hundreds of dollars.  Of course they do all this sneaky stuff through subsidiaries so they have plausible deniability, but if you can connect a few dots you’ll see it leads right up to the worst offenders.

By the way, I’ve written up a page on transferring your domains out of Godaddy.  It’s not an easy process, though Godaddy has made it a little easier than it has been in the past.

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One of the most important aspects of your website will be the layout and colors that you choose.  The layout should flow well, but some webmasters would tell you that more important than the layout is the color scheme that you choose.  Colors are the first thing that stand out to your websites users, so picking the right colors is very important.

Depending on the layout you will want to have one or two primary colors and one or two secondary colors.  The first primary color is found more prominently on the website while the first secondary color compliments that primary color.  You need to pick primary colors that don’t clash or stand out from one another.  A clashing color scheme is hard on the eyes and users will want to exit your site quickly.

It’s easier to pick your primary colors first since your secondary colors will compliment the primary ones.  For example, if you chose deep red as your first primary color your first secondary color should be a lighter shade of red.

The last thing to know about your color scheme is that you want to make the primary colors more bold, more deep than the secondary colors.  It would look weird for the primary color to be a pastel pink while the secondary is rose red.

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The easiest way to pay for your websites hosting costs is to sign up for an ad program.  There are a lot of them out there though.  So to get the most bang for your click what program should you go with?  Well the three big players are Google, Yahoo, and MSN with their contextual ad networks.  MSN has a pretty big sized ad network that pays pretty well, but both it and Yahoo are in their infancy when compared to the big G.  Google consistently outperforms Yahoo and MSN in terms of the ads being relevant to your site (meaning they have a large number of ads to display) and the payment per click.  In fact, Yahoo recently inked a deal with Google to share their ad networks with each other so that Yahoo can get in on some of Google’s action.  If you can’t beat them, and Yahoo certainly can’t beat Google (neither can MSN), join them.

Now that you have the major player picked the question revolves around your desire to dabble with some of the other players in the market.  In order to do so you’d have to make sure it’s not agains the Terms of Service for either provider to use another ad network on your website.  You will also need to realize that using another smaller ad provider will cost you a few clicks from your primary provider.  The main advantage to the secondary provider is that it allows you more ads per page (Google only allows 3 ads per page).  It also gives you a back up should you do something that your main provider deem agains their TOS and ban your account.

There are a number of smaller ad providers out there but the biggest one out there is called adbrite.  Using adbrite you can place ads on your page just like you can with Google.  An advantage with adbrite is that you can set the prices you want to be paid for the ads instead of just accepting whatever Google/Yahoo/MSN pay your for each of your clicks.

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So you’ve managed to make a website and gather a decent amount of traffic on the web.  Now you want to put some ads on the site, but the question is do you go with image ads or text ads?  The easy answer is text only ads.  Text only ads typically do better than image ads on a given website.  Though this performance is scewed because most people that use text only ads blend the ads into the content as well as possible to make the ads look like part of the content.  This is effectively tricking the reader into clicking the ads since they look like content.  So I like to think that the value on text ads is a bit skewed.

If the ad won’t be masquarading around as content on your site the answer is a bit more difficult.  I prefer to use a mix of text and image ads on my site in places that don’t interfere with the content.  The text ads give the reader more options to click on and these typically have higher pay per click.
The reason for using image ads is that they give an allure to your site.  Chances are you don’t have a site that’s ranked in alexa’s top 100,000 sites in terms of traffic.  Most sites that are highly trafficed will have an agreement set up with some third party ad placement agency that puts image ads on your site.  If you don’t have the traffic to attract such an agreement the image ads can give your users the illusion that you have more traffic than you do.  Perception is everything on the web.

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There are a lot of things to consider when using adsense. First and foremost, you need to experiment a lot. Because each website is different some things work well on one site and horribly on others. You’ll find a lot of good info on adsense from google (it’s in google’s best interest to see you succeed). You just need to search for it.

Some things to consider:

• Placement of ads
• Ad colors
• Blending ads into content/make them stick out
• size of ads
• number of ads on page
• what types of ads to use (link unit/video/text)

All these things will affect your earnings and there aren’t any straight forward answers. I find that people click my ads when the stick out more. You might not find the same. Play around with all of those things and be patient. Set up ads in different channels and over the course of 8-10 thousand impressions make an informed decision about what works best.

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One thing that a lot of webmasters encounter is frustration.  It’s easy to lose focus on your website when you get no traffic.  The Internet is an extremely competitive place and unless you have a lot of money for advertising or a very clever idea for a website chances are you’ll be last in line for traffic on the web.  One way to stave off this frustration is to set up realistic goals for your website.

It’s important to set small easy to obtain goals so that you don’t lose focus.  If you choose a goal of getting one thousand visitors a day it could be many months or years before that happens, during that time you won’t feel like you’re making any kind of progress.  The goals should be small and easily obtained at first.

It’s also important to set different kinds of goals.  Maybe your first goal is to average 50 unique visitors per day.  Then the next goal could be impressions per day (impressions are different than visitors, one visitor can generate many page impressions).  If you’re running ads on your site that pay per click you could set a goal of one click per day after that.  Then go back to unique visitors.  Then maybe instead of clicks per day it’s amount of money per day earned from the ads.

Keep going with the goals and make sure you vary them.  By varying your goals you’ll learn different things about your visitors.  You’ll also learn valuable lessons about traffic and how to convert it to money, returning visitors, and how you site will grow in the future.

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