Some plans to help the site grow

Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Wed Dec 15, 2004 8:08 pm

I have a few things I've been thinking of doing, so I'm just putting them here so I don't forget, and for everyone to know what to expect in the next few weeks or so.

They're in somewhat priority order.

1) Make the entire forum google spider friendly. This will involve changing the urls and won't have any noticable effect other then different looking urls when you hover, but if I do it like Iceteks even the address bar urls won't change. But I may also play with .htaccess style urls which would have an affect on apearance of urls but it's not like that's an issue. There's 3 ways I have in mind to go about doing this, so I'll pick one of em and go from there.

2) Ads... maybe not everyone will like this but I'll put some ads, for sure a leatherboard banner on top of everything, but below the logo, and other ads may go at other places such as the bottom. This will probably be only on the index, forum view and topic view, given those are the most potential places where someone would want to click. Don't worry there won't be popups I'm completely against them even if they do pay well. I'll go with google ads, and possibly try out a few other ad networks, though I tried in the past and got declined so don't count on them, we're not big enough yet.

Oh and the ads would probably be IP based. They would only show up a certain ammount of times per IP per time span. I'll experiment with this to see which offers the best CTR.

3) Forum skin. I do want to put a custom skin or at least a non-default one, so I may just change the CSS and graphics, or get and install a premade skin. I don't have time to make one, though if any of the other admins want to, go nuts. Just create a new skin set and when it's ready then we'll switch over and disable the default. I want to stick to having only one skin though, for modding purposes.

4) Offer extra service. Since this is just a forum, it might not be enough on it's own to attract people, so I want to think of other "services" that would be available. I only have one idea in mind but I'm open to others. One of them is to make it so members can have their own blogs. I'd make a php script for it, and that too, would be google spider friendly and have a few ads on it, and point to the home page and forum.

These are plans that will almost for sure be done, I have other little things in mind but not sure yet if I will do them or not. Even #4 is not a for sure, 1-3 are prety much the main ones that I want to get done within the next few weeks.

I'm hoping I can make enough money as well because if Iceteks and AF bring me enough cash for a dedicated server, I'll get one, and we'll have lot of room to expand as far as bandwidth and disk space is concerned. I do need to learn more about linux though especially DNS and email. But dedicated server is a seperate issue.

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 8:47 pm

I'm working on 1 right now, first I made all forums visible to public and now on my server I'll experiment with a new type of google friendly url. It will be better then the Iceteks one (but effectiveness won't really differ unless the google liking short urls myth is true...).

There's also outdated links on the home page that I'll fix at the same time. Oh and I combined requests with feedback/help. And members can reply in this forum now.

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sintekk · Post by **sintekk** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 9:25 pm

Good move on combining those two forums, makes it look nicer I think

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 10:03 pm

Man you should see the IPB 2.0 skinning system.

Horrible, just horrible. I can't even edit the files, I HAVE to edit the database... man they sure went in a bad direction. It used to read from files so it was easy to update on my server and upload here.... this is bad news as far as a custom skin is concerned, as well.

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sintekk · Post by **sintekk** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 10:05 pm

http://docs.invisionpower.com/kb/article.php?id=021

Skinning system doesn't seem too bad, but then again, I don't have hands on access. During christmas break, I might set up a server at home so I can test this out and try to make skins.

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 10:24 pm

The problem is that it's all stored in the database. You should NEVER store skins and other layout data in the database but they did it. The worse is that they have a file cache which is pretty much useless since you can't do anything with it. There's not even an option to update the DB from the file cache.

But oh well I only have a few things to edit so I'll do it live. It's just more convinient to do everything offline then when it works upload it and it suddently works live. Especially when making a skin.

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 10:53 pm

#1 accomplished now we'll see what google does. I'll have to install my logger script on here, I'll do that now.

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Fri Dec 17, 2004 12:04 am

Forgot to mention I also updated the home page, just got rid of links that went nowhere, and made the forum list dynamic. I plan to add more sooner or later.

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Mon Dec 20, 2004 6:36 pm

#2 is done. I'll start with simple google ads that are always present, and if the CTR is too low I'll try it IP based to see if the CTR is better. As long as I can stay at around 0.5 I'll be happy.

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