My shopping online....

Quite surprised this year with buying online, although I have always preferred to get out to the shops and buy myself rather than order online, but this year I decided to do a bit more online, did I save money? of course! 

My fist buy was WWE Smackdown v Raw 2010 for PSP a little hunting around and I found this at Game for £15.95 just about half price.

My second item was Need for Speed for Xbox 360, Gamestation came up trumps here at an amazing £24.95

Off to sportsdirect.com where this time I purchased World cup replica ball at £12.99 (£2.00 less than most places) and Nike Mercurial Veloci V Junior SG for £24.99 another good saving. What impressed me most about this was that I placed the order Wednesday lunchtime and the order was delivered Thursday lunchtime.

A Kodak ESP 3250 Printer from Currys although not ordered online, I reserved to pick up and saved £8.00

One thing I did purchase instore was an iPod touch 32GB, which as my wife works for Sainsburys we used her discount card and got 15% off, the bargain here was I also got a £25.00 itunes gift card free with the multi-buy offer. ipod touch and gift card £195.00

So not a bad shop this week, with good savings too... Thanks merchants!

Good or Bad 2009

An bit of an dodgy / slow start to the year. Especially with Justsalou website, which I thought would have done better at the start of the year when people are thinking about their holidays.

Come March things started to roll and I soon started to see it was not going to be that bad after all, with the site now in its second full year.  2008 saw 13184 visits and 43675 page views with 2009 to date coming in at 23,814 visits and 78,332 page visits, which considering the Euro and the recession I was quite pleased with.

Last year I decided to have a go at the Gift and presents market, nothing big, more of 'something to do' than anything else. In November this year I decided to have a play around again with JustThese, much happier with it now and just need to get some content on there. An ond link from the TimesOnline christmas gift guide for 2008 is getting more visitors to the site than it did last year, even though the product it was linking to is no longer available on there.

Most visitors from Google are for the phrase 'gifts under £5.00' which I seem to be placed No2 and No.3 for so can't be too bad. As for sales nothing great as yet, but there are sales and good commission sales too with the highest priced sale from the site at £154.95.

All in all not a bad year, with better results than 2008 so I cannot grumble, but most of all it has given me that push to carry on for a 2010.

New broadband new router - Solved...I hope!

With the problems I hve been experiencing with broadband lately, it was time to sort out a bit of fallover security. Looking around the different suppliers I decided to go with BT this time and get a new line installed and broadband together. I was amazed BT said this was going to be completed within 7 day, new line, new broadband and install.

Keeping my exisitng broadband with fixed IP addresses, the idea was to split the LAN with servers etc on the fixed IP's and the desktops using private IP addressing. The next task was to find a suitable router to achieve this. The router that was recommended was the Draytek 2820n Wireless router.

Now tis router is a remarkable bit of kit allowing a second ADSl connection to be added (this can even be a 3G wireless dongle). The router also offers static nat and a host of routing features that will suit me just fine. The best amazing thing about the Draytek 2020n is that it comes in at under £190.

Take a look at the Draytek 2820n

Crap service, Crap ISP's

Over the last few months I have spent weeks of it battling with an ISP about broadband connections so bad they were off for hours on end. My calls to support were met with, change router, change filter, time and time and time again. Whenthat failed  I am told it must be BT they supply the line, so I am left with the dilema of getting BT to check the line (at my cost) no problem found. I am advised to try a different brand of router, another £80 down the drain.

In the end I fire off an extreme email telling them how bad their service was and that paying £49.99 for business class broadband was a joke as my free Talk Talk broadband was faster and worked perfectly with no problems at all, I then concluded I was about to change another provider for our four sites.

Next day, I get an email from support telling me they changed my adsl profile and all will be fine now. (to which it has). All the b*****ks and then then put it right, not bad for something that they supposedly cannot do anything about.

This week, our email provided notified us the server had failed and there was no email server for a day, emails from two days had been lost and all archived email which some of my customers use via webmail system was also lost. I could have it back from backups but this will take days I am told and any email that come in meanwhile will be overwritten by the back up restore.

The email supplier also notified us they have no fall over system or backup email server. More absolute b*****ks.

Sometimes I wish some of these companys did not make it through the recession.

Adobe helping me big time

When I fired up Dreamweaver last time I noticed a small piece on the welcome screen referring to in-context editing.

Being a web designer for local business and such, I  am often asked about the end user being able to update pages themselves. The problem is I find more CMS systems pretty awful and make a hash of any layout design  in place. 

A little flick through the Adobe offering and here I am presented with a wisiwig page being able to edit the text and images from a web browser. In Dreamweaver I can set what is and what isn't editable. 

Just what I was looking for and makes life a whole lot easier, I love it!

http://incontextediting.adobe.com/

Metatag rip offs

Doing my usual placement checking and google checking today, I notice a website come up in the results witha  familiar title.

A little bit more check and I notice that I have a competitor to www.justsalou.co.uk.

Intrigued and after a little digging find my new competitor has decided not only to copy my page description word for word, but also my keywords word for word and in the exact same order.

Time will tell where the copying will end, as this new site has little content at present. I am not even sure it is a problem as such, how does Google fair with this, will it be frowned upon and Justsalou dropped from its clutches due to duplicate content, or will it go unoticed.

Only once before have I noticed any infringement from another website when an image was being lifted and used on another site, that time actually resulted in quite a few visitors gained from the other site after I splashed the JustSalou url across the image, which was then subsequently displayed on their site.

My first competition on justsalou

This week I decided to try a first for me and run an online competition and something to get my teeth stuck into, deciding upon a photo competition on my justsalou website

My first email off to scrounge some prizes resulted in one merchant coming back to me within a few minutes and some giveaway goodies arriving at my door the next day. (thanks to Peter at AttractionTix).

With a couple of days off from my full time job, was an ideal time to start putting the pages together. http://www.justsalou.co.uk/salou_photo_competition.asp Currently writing the comps terms and conditions trying to make it more fun rather than a megger serious competition.

I intend to launch the competition on 1st March, how it will go, I have no idea, never tried this before although seems to work well on other sites. I also think it may give some good content as the entries come in and who knows may get people to stay on the site a little longer.