The Online Home of Peter Claridge

July 30th, 2007

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And that’s why I have introduced easyCMS to the world today. easyCMS is the combination of 3 months of development to create a CMS that is targeted at webmasters and internet marketers looking for an easy way to create dynamic adsense sites.

easyCMS Promises To Make CMS Easy (yeah, we’re still working on the slogan!)

I’ve always felt that a CMS should be about managing your content, not about managing your design and layout. A CMS should be a useful tool to make your website interactive and dynamic, not try to control every aspect of your website.

So often I have gotten frustrated with the willingness of CMS developers trying to make the CMS everything to everyone that it becomes so complex and tricky it actually becomes unusable. Take Joomla for example. It’s a great CMS, with tonnes of tools. But why should I be told where the menu has to go and control all the menu options from the admin area? Why is the templating system only accessible to those that have degrees in rocket science? It’s too much.

Or how about Drupal? Another great CMS, but a degree in nuclear physics is a requisite if you plan on using the admin area or attempting to create a complete new design.

Why is easyCMS different?

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Posted in My Business, Design | No Comments »

July 28th, 2007

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When most people think of search engine optimization (well ok, only those that are actually nerdy enough to know what it is of course!) they immediately think about meta tags, keyword density and doorway pages.

Like many things when it comes to SEO, what once worked no longer does.

Take meta-tags for example. Way back when the internet was still a baby, meta tags were introduced to help search engines (at the time the big search engine was AltaVista…Google hadn’t even been invented) work out what the site was about. It wasn’t long before people started abusing the Meta Tags and when the next generation of search engines came about the importance of the meta tags diminished forever.

There are some self styled gurus that will tell you that you need the optimum keyword density to rank well in the search engines. The truth is, if there were an optimium density then it would be very easy to rank in the search engines. The best thing to do is to keep your writing natural and focus on the reader first, search engine second.

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Posted in Articles, SEO | No Comments »

July 27th, 2007

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Are We All Doomed?

Recently I watched a program that casts some serious doubts over many corporations claims that they are green or carbon neutral.To my mind, this entire “climate change” hysteria is being fuelled and fanned by the media. A couple of years ago it was Avian Flu that was going to decimate half the world’s population, before that it was SARS that was going to be the biggest killer of them all. Now it’s global warming and climate change.

Although there is no doubt that global warming is happening, I can’t see it as being the catastrophic disaster that the media is portraying it to be - simply because they’ll sensationalize any bit of bad news to make more money.

Nothing quite sells like bad news. Telling people “You are all going to be worse off! Find out why by buying our newspaper”. It’s a sure fire winner.

Anyway, climate change is now the buzz word and even the people living under rocks will be aware of it (you may have heard them comment that rocks are not like they used to be).

Never too far behind to miss a trick to make more money, many corporations are now jumping on this green bandwagon to give their corporate image that fluffy happy look. To be “carbon neutral” is the big thing. To leave the smallest possible “carbon footprint” is the goal.

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July 25th, 2007

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To the average internet user the acronym SEO is just yet another bit of gobbledegook internet jargon tossed around by web geeks and nerds. To some of us web geeks and nerds SEO is the be all and end all of internet promotion. The holy grail of appearing at number one spot on Google is a dream many of us aspire to bring in to reality…but often fall dismally short in Supplemental Hell.

So often the different between getting a good ranking and a bad ranking is down to how you approach the optimization of your site. As with most things in life there’s a right way and a wrong way. Do it the wrong way and you’re looking at a life in Supplementalville, do it right and you get to live on the converted home page bringing in so many visitors you won’t know what to do.

Sidenote: Google’s Supplemental Index are results that it gives when it can’t find anything definite that you are searching for. Web pages in the supplemental index are pages that don’t have enough inbound links for Google to ‘trust’ the page enough to serve it up as a main result.

If you want to get good rankings, then make sure you avoid these top 5 SEO mistakes:

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Posted in Articles, SEO | 1 Comment »

July 25th, 2007

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A few weeks ago I posted about how bad I though GoDaddy were and how bad the website interface was.

Well, I was doing a bit of reading the other day and it turns out that I’m not the only one who has issues with GoDaddy (we should probably all sign up to therapy and get a group discount). While the whole RegisterFly saga was unfolding, there was one site that everyone went to called RegisterFlies.com.

They were one of the first sites to break the (bad) news that GoDaddy was buying the RF customer database and transferring all the domains.

Anyway, I came across this post:

http://www.registerflies.com/myblog/godaddy-and-shady-transfer-policy.html

Which talks about GoDaddy’s shady transfer policy that is allegedly in blatant breach of ICANN’s policy (ICANN is the American based non-profit organisation that overseas and controls all .com domains - often referred to as ICANN’T due to their inability to take action).

Amongst some of the comments to the above article I came across some gems:

Here are some other reasons godaddy sucks.
1 they lie on there website and make you agree to not transfer your domain if you update your whois. This is just dishonest. Nothing in ICANN policy allows for this.

2, They have a reputation for shutting down sites based on uninvestigated complaints.
If someone complains that you are spamming with your domain they shut you down without any investigation. The burden is on you to prove you weren’t

3, They have a link in there whois to report false whois. Let me ask you; what qualifies any joe blow who looks up my domain in the whois to determine if the whois is false. This is asking for abuse. The type of abuse that led to the theft of familyalbum.com

By the way, and this is an aside. I found a domain I wanted the other day at godaddy that had false whois- bad email. Nothing can stop me from puttiing in a back order for it with godaddy and then reporting the false whois.
But I degress, let me go on.

4, Their control panel is the worst in Biz.

5 when You try to renew you have to deal with nonsense like having the renew auto set to 2 years and being upsold tons of junk on the long road to checkout.

6 [snip]

7. There is no grace period after your domain expires. The day it expires they will charge you a boatload of money to get it back. Reputalbe registrars dont pull this kind on nonsense. Why would anyone who knows anything about domains put up with this.

8 When you buy a domain at Godaddy or change your DNS to Godaddy, they steal your traffic for at least three days. That’s right folks you heard it hear first. They steal your traffic for at least three days. At any ohter registrar you can start using your domain right away. By the way this is grounds for a class action lawsuit and I am sure some clever attorney will get on it eventually.

The list goes on, but if your are stupid enough to use godaddy you probably already stopped reading

You can read the rest of the comments on GoDaddy on this page:

http://www.registerflies.com/myblog/godaddy-and-shady-transfer-policy.html

Many people seem to have issues with the frustrating checkout process that GoDaddy have where they attempt to upsell you every product and service they have, try to get you to buy other domain extensions, default the registration period for two years and so on. For seasoned webmasters and domainers this is just tedious and infuriating. Definitely at the very least I think they should have an option in the users profile to have a quick checkout option that bypasses all that crap.

I’ve also come across this site that gives various horror stories about GoDaddy:

http://www.nodaddy.com

Posted in Articles, Moans | No Comments »