Finally got around to re-doing the website....

I really wasn't happy with it. I'd farted around with it and ended up with a messy, bloated pile of cack.

So it was time to simplify. Back to basics. Mainly anyway.

I took another very straightforward site as a template, but Bren reckoned it was boring. She liked the home made feel of my earliest efforts.

So I've kept the effective bells and whistles - The contact form, which works as it should and passes any enquiries onto my mobile phone within a minute of hitting the "send" button, and the random testimonial generator stays too, but the slideshow is gone, as are most of the graphics. Just a banner and 4 buttons (I couldn't resist making them rollovers!) and just 4 pages.

My website has gone from almost 3 Mb to 249 Kb. This should make it more phone/tablet friendly, and if I need to update it in anyway, it should do so much quicker.

And everything works!

...Nearly everything.

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Sliding ever onwards...

 Now this is something like...

http://www.paulsharpdriving.co.uk/test.htm

But now I'm not happy with the page layout. I want to make the top banner take up a lot less of the screen.

Might as well do a completely new graphic I suppose.

Watch this space...

driving lessons in Wallasey?

Sliding along nicely....

This is by no means the finished product, but here's where I'm up to.

http://www.paulsharpdriving.co.uk/test.htm

Currently the images are not clickable. In the finished version, each picture will send the delighted clicker off to it's own dedicated page.

The images themselves are really just to make sure the concept works. The final images will be substantially different (probably) The layout will become more compact. I will have 4 or possibly 5 pictures in the slideshow. The current order of slides is not how things will be when finished.

But apart from that, it's exacly how I want it. :)

driving lessons in Wallasey?

Slip slidin' away

While keeping the same basic format of HOME | PRICES  | CONTACT | LINKS, I have plans to make the "HOME" bit a bit more razzle-dazzle.

What I have in mind is to create a series of images, each of which is made up of text and an image. The text would be in a light colour, the image would be colourful. The background would be #000000. The image would occupy almost all of the area beneath the link bar and logo.

Then, probably after reading this tutorial about a hundred times, I will copy and paste the code and modify it's contents to point to the images I've created.

The result being a slideshow of images, each of which can be clicked to take the viewer to a page on the site that gives more information. Not tonight, mind, but in the next few weeks hopefully.

driving lessons in Wallasey?

Gimps, Gears and Geeks.

Gimp can make animated gifs. I never knew this before.

Here's one I made earlier.

The reson I made this particular animated gif is because I had this idea that if I was so excited by the prospect of chucking a really quick car around a track, then presumably the sort of person that goes looking for driving lessons might be too. So I intend to do a prize draw in 2012, with the supercar driving experience as the prize.

On a similar vein, I've just sent an enquiry to a local (ish) company that does skid control lessons with a view to offerering one of their things as a prize, or even some kind of collaborative venture where they offer some kind of discount, and I incorporate them into my curriculum.

driving lessons in Wallasey?

Yay! SMS a go-go!

I spent hours trying to get gmail to forward driving school enquiries to my phone without success, but eventually, by using a proxy service, I got it sorted out. Enquiries from my contact form cause my phone to alert me about a minute after they've been sent.

Good times (inserts a big smilie)

driving lessons in Wallasey?

e-mail to sms...

driving lessons in Wallasey?

I got a couple of enquiries today via the contact form. Unfortunately, I didn't get to read them until several hours after they were sent, so I'm currently trying to find out if it's possible to either make the contact form generate a text message to my phone, instead of an email to my gmail account, or to forward those emails (and only those emails) to my phone as a text message.

Incomprehensible...

I'm trying to put links to various social media websites on my website.

I want people to "Like" my website, so I became an approved developer, and generated the code for a facebook "Like" button.

I put the code into my website, and upload the updated page to my ftp server. Then I take a look at my page.

And there at the bottom, exactly where I want it is a lovely Google+1 button.

Huh?

I do want a google+1 button on my page, but I don't want two google buttons and no facebook button.

This one has me scratching my head.

Just as a matter of interest, I shall put the same code here. The next line should be a facebook like button...

Never mind. Just a cache problem. It shows up properly on Bren's PC, and now shows up properly after I closed the window and opened the page in a new window.



driving lessons in Wallasey?

Googlicious!

Google are trying to promote internet based business growth in Liverpool and it's environs. I got invited to the launch event. Along with the beer and circuses you'd expect (jellybeans, stress putty and dancing girls, all in Google's corporate colours, and the hyping up of what the internet can do for local businesses, there was some genuinely useful stuff to be had.

The speakers told us about Google Analytics. This gives data on who is visiting my site, and why. Currently, hardly anyone is, except me, and I don't count.

Also there's Google Insights. This tells you how popular certain search phrases are.

Here, for example, is how popular various driving instructor relevent search enquiries are.



There's an obvious correllation between the terms, and there is an equally striking seasonal variation in when people look for lessons.

Then there's a thing called the Google Juice bar. This is basically a free 40 minute session that includes an audit of my website, and advice on how to maximise it's potential. I'm booked in for this on Tuesday.


Here are the dancing girls by the way. The sound quality is bloody awful.

Next bit...

I got a call on my mobile phone about a week ago.

Some guy from Manchester was offering his services as a search engine optimiser. I felt for him, as he was clearly working hard to get his business off the ground. But I'm trying to do as much as I can for myself, to keep the costs down, to expand my knowlegde and experience into new areas, and because I'm a stubborn bugger. So I politely declined his offer.

However, now that I have a site I'm happy with, I need to get my ratings up, and as ever, I want to do it without spending money.

I asked for advice on some discussion boards, and was pointed in the direction of certain software, that I then "acquired". Normally this software costs a couple of hundred quid. A few years ago, I wouldn't have felt the slightest twinge of guilt about such acquisitions. These days I'm more aware that somebody somewhere is not getting what they should be entitled to.

I'm also aware that in saying "Come and have driving lessons with Paul Sharp", I'm also saying "Don't give your money to Joe Bloggs" despite Joe Bloggs also needing to make a living. Nature of the beast of course. Everybody has to compete for everything. Ah well. Come the glorious day...

Anyway, this SEO stuff is stretching me. I understand the basic idea: Put the right keywords into your site and get other sites to link to it. There's other stuff too.

Then submit site to search engines. Said search engines then say "OK. Lots of lovely relevent stuff here. Put it up near the top..."

There are things that don't work properly with the software I got but I've used it to look at the html of other local driving school websites, the ones that show up at the top of the listings, and put a lot of the same meta tags into my headers.

I've also used it to look at the code of my site and check it for errors. It found quite a few. It also told me exactly where and what they are, so I should be able to fix most of them.

The text contained within my webpages is also important. I ran a sort of scan that simulates what a google spider does. It told me this:

Total web page size:    10,632 bytes
Visible text size:    612 bytes
Total HTML size:    10,020 bytes
Visible text to web page size ratio:    5.76% (the more the better)
Number of images:    6

Context is important of course. It's saying the more the better, but this is a little worrying. I wanted to keep it all simple and clear, not windy and verbose. A hangover from the days of dial up perhaps, but to me it makes sense to optimise and minimalise.

The same spider simulator can also be used on other sites. Generally the ratio seems to be about 15-20%. All the pages I've looked at contain far more links than mine does.

I've spotted some interesting techniques. For example, one highly ranked page had a list of almost every town on Wirral. Each link had it's own seperate page. Karen Jones does lessons in Wallasey, and the rest of Wirral. Are you looking for driving lessons in Wallasey? Call her on 012345678. Karen Jones does lessons in Greasby and the rest of Wirral. Are you looking for driving lessons in Greasby? Call her on 012345678. Etc.

I think that's a really good idea. I only need to do one page, then use it as a template, and from there, fill my index page with intra-site links.

So... Work to be done still. Some of this is interesting. Some of it is just really boring and repetitive, and some of it is frustrating and mentally taxing.

First Contact!

I've wanted to be able to do a contact form for yonks. Somehow I was never able to get my head around it.

Today, I have spent a long time reading up on it, and with a lot of trial and error, I finally managed to get a proper contact form on my website. One that forwards queries and comments directly to my email account. I was able to make use of some free code downloads from this site.


A contact form effectively comes in two parts. The first part is html code that allows people to make comments. The second part is something called php code, which then sends the comments to a specified place, in this case, my e-mail address.

What I couldn't work out was the way it all fits together in a website. So I spent ages copying the php code into my webpage, and wondering why it was not working properly. Eventually it dawned on me that the php code is a seperate file that you ftp up onto your host server. The html code then goes looking for it.

But this wasn't just a matter of copying and pasting. I added a new field for phone numbers, and altered the php file so that it correctly went through. I have some idea of what I'm doing with this stuff now.

I've also tidied up, made a few stylistic changes, and spent a long and annoying time debugging things that should on the face of it have worked. Tables are wonderful things, but they do sometimes do some frustrating things.

So now I have a website that I'm happy with, at least for now. Now I need to get people to see it.

I keep wanting to send myself messages!

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you want 'em! I got 'em!

New boots and panties.

Same body, different clothes. The font is the same, but the white on black is slightly less visually intrusive than the black on white, so I didn't need to make it smaller or finer.

I've stripped things down too. Some of my good ideas seemed like gimmicks in retrospect. So simpler, cleaner, neater. Nicer buttons to press, with rollover effects. Fewer distractions, which gives greater prominence to the stuff that is there. Important stuff like contact details and price list.

I've been reading about how to climb the rankings, and asking around, and it seems like
 what I mainly need to do is give things time to happen. Weeks and months rather than days, and the site has only been up for maybe 2 months? And as Mr Bliss pointed out to me in an earlier post, the likes of google have standards they like to be adhered to. Therefore I will be blatently putting a line of linky texty stuff at the bottom of this post, and other posts too rather than sneakily trying to do background colour text.

Ad free site? Hmmm...

Incidentally, guess how much I've made from the adverts on the failyourtest site?

That's right. Nothing whatsoever.

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PAS school of Motoring rides again!

I've re-bought my domain name from my old school, and linked it to paulsharpdriving.

Reason being, my old driving school, PAS school of Motoring, is still showing up in searches for driving lessons in my area.

Also, the dot com name also links properly to my site.

The new name cost me about six quid. If I get even one pupil from it, it will be well worth it.

Bloody Learners!

As people learn to drive, they get to a stage where they can do certain things, but while they are driving, they encounter things that they are not yet equipped to deal with.

So they are driving down the road, and everything is fine. But then they encounter a parked car, and there's something coming the other way. Generally, the way they try to deal with it is by steering to the left, when what they should be doing is slowing the car down. I often have to take control of the car in situations like this, to save my door mirrors.

And so it is with me and putting websites up.

There are certain things I can do comfortably. Other things are cropping up that are stretching me. If it's all going as it should be, I can just plod on and do what needs to be done. But when something isn't happening the way it should, I have to work out ways of sorting it out, rather than having those ways in place.

Tonight is a case in point. I've spent hours trying to get my FTP program to talk to the hosting site. Each time I tried to connect, it would try for a minute or two, then chuck out an error message. I tried all sorts of variations on passwords and hostnames and usernames to no avail. A closer examination of the error message seemed to show that the FTP program was connecting to the server, but that the server wasn't responding.

That couldn't be right, surely? I must have done something wrong somewhere. I downloaded filezilla and tried to use that, but I'm at the stalling when you drive off from the side of the road stage with it. Can't make head nor tail of it at the moment, frankly. I kept reading the email from the hosting site, and putting in the details it appeared to want, and continued to fail. I tried using the FTP thing in dreamweaver, and that reckoned the server was the problem too.

And so it was at this point that I went to the host site and checked the service status, and lo and behold! One of their servers is down.

Of course, it could be that the server that I'm trying to use (they have more than one) is fine, and I've bollocked things up in some way I haven't figured yet. Or it could be that the server is down, but that I've also done something wrong.

Update: I contacted customer services, and they got a solution to my inbox very quickly. My DNS settings were wrong, because of the arse about tit way I've gone about this. Normally people buy domain names and hosting at the same time. I bought a DNS management app because I wanted to host elsewhere, and that was pointing me to the wrong place.

So, http://www.paulsharpdriving.co.uk now leads to an actual website, although it's just a CSS template right now. I have a few more lessons today so I don't have time to do a lot of work on this at the moment, but later I will be able to really crack on with it hopefully :)

A "proper" website then...

Last night's post was something of a low point. Bren was really upset. The harsh realities of our situation hit her and through her, me. Unless we manage to get this off the ground, we could end up having to sell our house, which is in need of considerable work, as we've had no money to spend on it for so long. So we'd get sod all for it. Would not have enough to buy another house, even if we downsized, and would end up renting. Meanwhile since we'd have the money in the bank from the sale of the house, we wouldn't get housing benefit and the money would disappear as rent in about 4 years, leaving us with nothing.

So there is a need for urgency. I've got some proper hosting. less than £30 for 2 years is a good deal, yet I'm worried about spending such a sum. It's a drop in the ocean of course, but I can do stuff properly, and that may ultimately save me money if my site gets hits without spending money on advertising.

Funny what misconceptions you can have.

Last time I did this, I had all sorts of problems because I thought the root directory was the one at the top, rather than an obscure one right at the bottom of some chain of folders. The clue is in the name of course, but I saw "root" as "Where it all stems from" rather than "The thing at the bottom"

I've sorted my ftp software out. I paid for a license for that 4 years ago, and it still applies, so I was able to just reinstall it from the website. Ipswitch WS_FTP. I've found it to be comprehensible, although I will have to relearn how to do all this to some extent.

It's going to be another late night!

Meta tags and meta titles...

Having got the basic site up, and while awaiting the DNS thing, I decided to add metadata to the head of the site(s)

Unfortunately, blogger vets the code as I send it, and strips all that stuff out.

The best laid plans of mice and men go aft astray :(

So what to do?

1. Carry on regardless. Since I intend to pay for advertising to get my site seen, it might not matter too much, easpecially given that meta tags don't necessarily help that much anyway.
2. Carry on regardless but put the keywords in some other way, like way down at the bottom after a whole load of empty lines
3. See if wordpress does it any better.
4. Get some proper webspace instead of trying to do something to which a blog is not well suited.
5. Embrace the blogginess! If all I need is a place to sell my services, why shouldn't a blog work as well as a more conventional site? I would still have issues with promotion of the site though.

If I do choose to put it somewhere else, a lot of the work has already been done. Just a matter of grabbing the code and putting it somewhere else. I have some FTP software on a disk somewhere from last time I had my own school, so I wouldn't have to shell out for that this time around.

Phase one complete!

Well that's done. For now I'm happy. It's a friendly looking easy to navigate site. It will of course be fine tuned over the next few days. Small beer. Changes to wording and to the position and prominance of phone numbers and what have you.

Next thing to do is to make one or both of my domain names point to it.

Now what did I do with that tutorial?

The other thing I want to do is turn the header image into an animated gif - overlaying testimonials eulogising my abilities.

Update:

And now I wait.

I changed the DNS settings at my host, but blogger reckons things are not right yet. I have to give it a day before I can find out if I've done things correctly. I made the changes yesterday evening, so if it's still not right tomorrow, I've probably done things wrongly.

More on Posts and Pages...

Thank you to Jim for his wise words. Apologies for not immediately taking up his suggestions. I want to concentrate on blogger for now, and get something really nice going on.

The way I've arranged things has both strengths and weaknesses.

The html gives me a lot of control over how things look, but I'm limited by the structure of blogger itself.

Essentially, I wanted tabs within the main page that would take the visitor to another page that had the same theme. Last time I did this sort of thing, I used a frameset. I suppose there might have been a way of doing that here. One for the future maybe, if doing things this way has a negative effect, as has been suggested to me privately.

Posts and pages get buried beneath the html stuff. They also sit upon a semi opaque background, in contrast to how the html stuff looks.

But there is a way around it!

Create other blogs, and put the required information into the html, just as it is on the main page. Then simply point the links to the right places and bob's yet bleedin uncle, innit?

The fail blog will have to stay page based, but that's OK. It cuts down on the work I have to do changing links and creating blogs. I will change it's appearence though to more or less match the rest. It's a bit dark as it is anyway.

Y'know? I'm really pleased with the way this is going. I think it looks nothing like a blog and with a bit more work, I will have something I can start promoting.

Posts and pages

In blogger, you can add pages as well as posts, but you can only use the main original page to do multiple posts. At least that's the way it seems. This is a shame, because if I could post to the pages, I could move the fail your test thing directly over. Perhaps Wordpress offers this function.

Hmmmm. It doesn't appear to.

Alternatively, being able to get the page link just below the title to point to something other than a page - Like a fail your test blog for example. I'm sure that's not directly possible, but I could easily make some buttons in gimp, and attach hyperlinks to them. There might be a way of copying the html into the site.

I'd have to upload the buttons to  somewhere.

This is all coming together quite nicely. It's not finished by any means, but I have a method. - Use the wysiwyg html I'm familiar with, and paste it in to a html box. I don't need any actual posts. A page was useful for uploading the button images to. Clicking them gave me their url.

So I can work on fine tuning style and content, but I can get my head around this way of doing things.

Right now, I have a big long letterbox format picture at the top of my page. Plenty of room there to display testimonials.

I've looked at how it's possible to create a random quote generator on blogger, and there are ways of doing it.

What I can do though is turn that header image into an animated gif. I know it works in wordpress because that's how I did the header for damnthewholeworld I'm pretty confident that it will work in blogger too, especially since it's using the html box.

Simply overlay testimonial text onto background image and turn them into an animated gif, setting appropriate time delay between frames.

Onwards....