February 5th, 2010 — SEO, tutorials
So you’ve got a website. What’s it doing for you? How do you know?
There are 2 different kinds of optimization I’m going to write about here and in upcoming articles.
- Search engine optimization (SEO), making your site friendly to search engines, so they will present it to searchers;
- User optimization, or making your site as easy for your user to find what he’s looking for as possible.
There’s a ton of stuff out there to read about search engine optimization. Getting your site seen on Page 1 of search engines is better than advertising in a lot of ways. While companies do pay good money for specialists to perform this service for them, it is possible for someone with a small site to learn to do it themselves. If you do it yourself, that is free advertising.
There is less information out there about user optimization. The deal is, if you pay for advertising or put a lot of work into getting searchers to visit your site, do you know what to do to maximize the chances of them finding what they were looking for?
So right now I want to talk a bit about making your site user-friendly.
The most important rule in designing a website is that your users should be able to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. They should be able to see immediately what the purpose of the page they have landed on is, and they should be able to see where they can go from there without scrolling around or clicking. Then, when they click the link that looks like it is going to take them where they want to go, they should end up exactly where they expected to be.
If surfers don’t see what they are looking for within a few seconds, they will click away and find some other site to look at.
Example: If you have a phone sex site, you may have a warning page the surfer will have to click past before getting to your main page. Is there any content on it that gives the surfer a reason to keep going, or is there a scroll box with legalistic mumbo-jumbo? Look at it critically. Does your main page have XXX rated photos on it? No? Then get rid of that warning page. Make the photos on the entry page R-rated and provide enough information on it so that anyone landing on it will know what they have found, so they can either leave or continue.
Making the user click past a pointless entry page is causing your site to lose customers before they even find your content.
Now, open your main page. Close your eyes. Now open them again. What is the most noticeable element on your main page? Is it clear without reading anything that it is probably a phone sex site they have landed on and are about to enter?
Is there anything that has been added to the page that distracts from that idea? Is there a big block of dense text talking about…something? Move it to its own page.
Presumably you have links to other pages. There might be a “gallery” page, “about me”, “blog”, “news”, “links”. How easy is it for the visitor to find the links to navigate to those other pages? Is there an obvious navigation bar, or are there some links or buttons here or there?
Once there, how easy is it for the visitor to get back or visit another page?
Is anything cluttered? There are sitebuilders out there that make it easy for users to randomly jam odds and ends into their pages. Resist the temptation. Don’t do it.
Where do you have a “call to action”, telling the visitor what to do, ie, “call me!”? On every page?
You need to think about all these things, because your visitor does not intend to spend any time thinking at all. Think about it.
If you need to clean up your website, get to it!
January 14th, 2010 — Color stuff, Niteflirt issues, Tips and tricks, backgrounds
Put this code at the top of your listing, substituting a named color or a hex code color (also found on the same charts). You can pick an unnamed hex code color using a free color picker.
<body border=”0″style=”background-color:black;”>
Leave the spacing exactly as it is.
January 4th, 2010 — Web hosting
I have had Dreamhost as my webhost for years. If you’re looking for a webhost that will let you have unlimited domains and permits you to do almost anything with your account. They don’t have a fast and dirty sitebuilder. I definitely recommend against fast and dirty sites, but hey, whatever you want to do, it’s your site.
Shop around. If you decide to go with Dreamhost, use this code: 6ZZIBMU2 and get a $50 discount.
December 31st, 2009 — For Niteflirt, Spreadsheets
This was requested on the forum. Hardly seems worth charging over. It is set up for 10 accounts. It gives you a place to type in debits as they are taken from your Niteflirt account, and to check them off when they show up in your bank account. It even totals up your debits for the day and months.
Spreadsheet.xls
December 26th, 2009 — Email forms, Free!
Cara of CarasCam made this tutorial, and I made my first contact form using it.
If you are comfortable with editing something you don’t really understand, you can probably get it to work for you. Instead of being an HTML page with instructions, it is a script that has inline notes:
“// This is an inline note telling you what to do”
explaining what each part does and where you need to edit to make it work for you. This is how many free script tutorials you will find on the web work.
Save it as a .php file, edit it, then upload it to your site. The link you put to it will display a contact form that will submit to your email, after you have it set up.
Free script
December 6th, 2009 — Free!, html help, templates
This isn’t intended to be a substitute for a full listing design and layout. It’s for those of you who have zero formatting on your listings and don’t know the first thing about it.
Pick your options, type your text in the Header text box and a paragraph of text in the Text area, and click the button. If you don’t like it, you can keep editing, because your text will stay in that box as long as you work on it.
All the text will run in together into one giant paragraph. Where you want a line break, copy and insert this: <br><p> into your listing edit window when you go to edit your listing.
That’s it!
LINK
Hopefully this will encourage you to learn a little more HTML.
December 3rd, 2009 — Email Templates, For Niteflirt
I cleaned out the old email templates and made a few new ones here. I can probably rework the old ones and make them work better than ever, in about the same time it would take to create them new, of course. So that may happen, or I may just make shiny new ones.
Link
December 2nd, 2009 — Callbuttons, Niteflirt issues, Tips and tricks, tutorials
Unless you are using the old pre-transition callbuttons (which stopped working but then later became active again), your flirt-installed callbuttons do not change status when you change status. Code for those callbuttons is no longer distributed.
The link to callbutton code on your My Account page no longer is present. The link on our listings has not been coded, and if you click it the page ends up being refreshed. The only way to get current callbutton codes for your listings is to open a listing as if to edit it, submit twice without editing (unless you need to edit, of course), then click the link on the page that also has links to your account and help in getting started.
A callbutton whose code is obtained in this way while you were available is static code. It will always be set to available, though customers cannot complete a call by clicking it when you are unavailable. It will not send mail when you are Away.
I got this button while I was available:
<a href=”http://beta.niteflirt.com/calls/new?listing_id=5734291″ title=”Yes – Taking Calls”><img alt=”D5_cb-call-now-136×40_v5″ border=”0″ height=”40″ src=”http://beta.niteflirt.com/niteflirt/images/D5_cb-call-now-136×40_V5.gif” width=”136″ /></a>
A callbutton whose code was obtained while you were away is also static code. It is supposed to send mail, and cannot change to “taking calls”. But the server is left off the code, so it refers back to your own server, and actually can never do anything if you place it anywhere but on your Niteflirt page. And why would you need to do that? There already is a ’send mail’ option on your pages.
I got this code while I was set to ‘Away’:
<a href=”/messages/compose?message%5Blisting_id%5D=5734291&message%5Brecipients_list%5D=Principal+Angela+Quattrano”><img alt=”D5_cb-mail-away-136×40_v4″ border=”0″ height=”40″ src=”http://beta.niteflirt.com/niteflirt/images/D5_cb-mail-away-136×40_V4.gif” width=”136″ /></a>
If someone were to try to click it to send me mail, the address it would try to send mail to is http://help4flirts.com/messages/compose?message%5Blisting_id%5D=5734291&message%5Brecipients_list%5D=Principal+Angela+Quattrano, which is definitely not a real email address.
With the pre-transition codes, both the image and your availability are controlled by the Niteflirt server, not by the button. So the image changes when your availability changes, as does what happens when the button is clicked.
This pre-transition callbutton displays my correct availability status:
<a href='http://www.niteflirt.com/calls/PT_interimcall.asp?sid=XXXXXXX'><img border=0 src='http://www.niteflirt.com/calls/callimage.asp?sid=XXXXXXX&ImageType=1'></a>
I have changed the listing SID number to a series of x’s. Just substitute your listing SID number (found in the url of your listing).
November 19th, 2009 — Niteflirt issues
First, you need to understand the difference between profile thumbnails and photos within the listing. If you are getting a message that the filesize, picture size, or filetype is wrong, then you are talking about the thumbnails that link from the category indexes to your listing.
You upload a profile thumbnail through the link at the bottom of your listing edit window that has a little box where your picture will be displayed when you get it uploaded.
IE simply doesn’t work for most girls.
Some girls have problems with different browsers. I was able to do this with Firefox, Opera, and K-Meleon. Other girls have found that only Google Chrome will do it. Try downloading that.
The regular photo uploader has not been installed yet since the transition. We do not have an eta on that. You will have to find an image host to upload them to. Some people use photohostess, which does not have private accounts. Some girls complain about downtime.
Most photo hosts are not adult-friendly. They will delete your account and you will lose your pictures in a heartbeat.
I think there are adult-friendly paid photo hosts.
If you do find some kind of photo hosting situation, better back up your photos. Who knows what could happen to your account? The site could shut down leaving you with no photos and no options.
Consider buying a domain and a regular hosting account. It is actually really straightforward to create a directory to host your own pics, videos, recordings, or whatever once you get the hang of it. You can also host your own blog or website.
I have dreamhost and I am satisfied with the service they give me. Email me if you want a discount code for them.
Standard HTML image code is:
<img src=”http://imageurl”>
Background image code:
<body background=”http://imageurl”>
which you would put at the very top of your listing edit window.
November 17th, 2009 — Niteflirt issues
There’s been quite a discussion in the forums about the way individual listing availability control should be designed by Niteflirt, and I won’t get into that here. There still seems to be a lot of confusion about how it currently works, and that’s what I would like to clear up.
If you’re still trying to use the listing availability links as before and it’s not working for you, you are fighting the new system. If you are finding it does all kinds of unpredictable things, that’s because they changed it without notifying us or changing the help file. It operates in a completely different manner. It works, but it’s like a new feature which is not equivalent to the old feature it replaced.
The old system was designed to permit someone to change the status of one listing. Either from within your listing or from inside your Listing Details page you could click on the availability status of that one listing, go to another window, and change it. If you only wanted one odd listing on or off on an occasional basis, it worked great with that.
So, things the old system was good at:
- Turning on only one listing;
- Turning off only one listing.
Things it was not so good at:
- Managing multiple listings, rather than just one with a different status – could take a while to change all the ones that needed changing;
- Managing listings in multiple accounts – could take a whole lot of time.
What it couldn’t do at all:
- Save your chosen settings for next time. They were gone every time you changed your account status.
Listing availability is now focused on managing multiple listings and saving your settings, rather than having one listing different from the others.
Changing the availability of a listing within the listing itself or inside your Listing Details page now is changing the preset on it. Listings that are set to Away on the Listing Details page will not go on when the account is turned on. Listings that are set to Available on the Listing Details page will turn on when your account is turned on.
There is no need to make your listings show as Away on the Listing Details page when your master Availability is set to Away.
The settings will stay with your account until the next time you go in there and change them.
