A standard screen resolution is 1028 pixels, but also the sum total horizontal room needed for the two most popular IAB ad units is 1028 pixels. If I want to maximize a website design for ad display that often involves using both 728 pixel wide leaderboards and 300 pixel wide rectangles.

So, it fits perfectly right? No, not quite. The obvious solution is to put the box ad somewhere on a left or right menu or side bar (and maybe a second one nested in a content paragraph), then to put a 728 ad above the content. But you have to account for pixels taken up by the browser scroll bar on the right side of the screen, and you need padding or spacing between page elements or it’ll look bad, so that 1028 resolution shrinks to something like, minimum, 970, and that just isn’t enough room.

So it has been a battle, trying to figure out an optimal ad layout while limiting resolution so that people on 1028 or smaller resolutions do not have to horizontal scroll.

On some sites I’ve done a hybrid situation where I park the 728 leaderboard over BOTH the content block, and the sidebar block, and that can work. That type of layout can even squeeze into an 800 wide resolution (which we should have all left by now, if not, do so, you’ll make more money). On other sites I’ve limited myself to a 250 pixel wide box ad. Then I get these emails from Google “You know if you changed this ad from 250 pixels to 300 pixels you’d make like $100 more per day?” I think “Great, okay Google, I’d love $36,500 more per year, but you tell me how I’m supposed to fit it in?”

The solution is to kick 1028 to the curb. 85% of browsers now use a resolution higher than 1028×768. So this past week I tweaked my garden blog settings to be bigger than 1028 so I could get a beefier sidebar without losing my 728 content ads. This site finally pushed me to do this because it uses a lot of big pictures in posts, and so I wanted to keep the large post space, and because I wanted to include a few new things like recent forum posts on the sidebar (so as to draw more traffic into the forum) and it really needed a wider column.

I plan to do this same thing with some of my other sites in the future (such as the site Google keeps telling me will earn more, but its bigger, and will take some time), and I tell you what, it feels good to be unchained from 1028 limitations. I settled on a width of 1050, which allows me to fit in what I wanted to fit in. It does mean approximately 15% of my users may have to horizontal scroll, slightly, but that is okay, maybe it’ll get them to upgrade their computer.

I had hired through elance a company called Value on Web to do some programming for me last year. They had good feedback and lots of completed projects, including one just like what I wanted. Their bid was not even close to the lowest.

Look at this code they did:

if ($_POST['submitForm'] == "yes") {
if($_FILES['store_image']['size'] >0){
$image1 =date("Ymds")."_".$_FILES['store_image']['name'];
move_uploaded_file($_FILES['store_image']['tmp_name'],'../store_pic/'.$image1);
//@resize_img('../store_pic/'.$image1,150,100, false, 80, 0, "");
copy("../store_pic/".$image1,"../store_pic/thumb/".$image1);
//@resize_img('../store_pic/thumb/'.$image1,52,100, false, 80, 0, "");
}

This is a bit of a script to handle an uploaded image.

These so called professionals thought this was good enough, can anyone see the problems?

You absolutely always need to check what sort of file is being uploaded when you accept uploads or you could unwittingly allow people to upload malicious scripts and code. You can check the mimetype of the file, and definitely the extension. If the file is not an image mimetype, reject it. If the file does not end with (not include, but end with, otherwise someone could upload image.jpg.php) .jpg (or .gif or .png, etc) reject it. Also, have the system generate the filename randomly, so the user cannot access it after upload.

This isn’t a secret, this isn’t complicated code, had they done a basic google search for how to do a php image upload they would have found numerous examples of code that they could copy and paste that would do this. They were just lazy, or they didn’t know any better. I’m not sure which is worse.

I expect when I pay thousands of dollars to a company I don’t need to go over every line of their code to make sure it works, if I need to do that, I might as well just code it all myself.

So, my server was hacked, website homepages were defaced, and I spent an evening cleaning it up. The extent of the infiltration was such that I am no longer comfortable with this server, it is tainted. So I’ve decided to get a new server and migrate all sites. Thankfully cPanel/WHM has AWESOME migration tools that can move a site in minutes instead of the hours it used to take me manually. This is hugely beneficial when you have many sites. Also, the server was 4 years old so probably about time to get a new one anyways, and because of Moore’s law and whatnot, my new server will be 3x more powerful for the same monthly price.

Don’t think that this can’t happen to you, it can. Botnets scour the Internet for insecure forms, no matter how small and insigicant your site is you can and will be targetted because everything is automated. I believe most servers end up probed within minutes of being hooked up to the Internet.

Why are forums good? Well, there are many reasons, lets start first with how they provide a stable core of traffic for your site. If you have a popular, vibrant, growing forum with a critical mass of active users, even if all your search engine rankings were to evaporate your site would likely still survive as the forum would continue to grow. All your forum members would be telling their friends about it, linking to it from their Facebook profiles, and everything else. Forums provide a stabilizing affect on your traffic that helps your site weather swings and shifts in other traffic sources.

Of course, forums also help your search engine traffic by providing a treasure trove of content that search engines can index and list. Try making a content site that doesn’t rely on user submitted content and try to reach the sheer page count possible with a forum. You might have hundreds, even thousands, of articles on a website and yet a forum will almost always dwarf that with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of posts.

A forum can even help prevent losses in search engine traffic. When I, and many of you I’m sure, started in this business it was quite different, there was less competition, and overall less people knew that you could make money online. The bubble burst of 1999 and 2000 made most people think the Internet was money poison, a few of us knew that by staying small, and keeping costs low, you could make really good money.

Now, however, things have changed. The mainstream media has reported dozens and dozens of human interest stories of average people making large incomes by running websites out of their homes or small offices. This perception of easy money has attracted people who look for get rich quick schemes, people who do not quite understand how to program, market, design, or otherwise put out a good website. They rely on stolen content, stolen ideas, gibberish, spam, and other things. But they do know enough to at least make their website look real enough to a machine.

This is where human reviewers come in, search engines employ human reviewers in a quality control capacity for reviewing their search results. Additionally we’ve had human reviewers, in the form of link popularity algorithms, for a long time. As such it is vitally important that your site come off well to humans, and there are certain things you can do to accomplish that. One of them is bragging about your content, but additionally having a forum will help. The Google Human Reviewer handbook specifically has a section about how an active forum is a huge vote against labeling a site as spam. So when you want to be sure your site passes muster when reviewed by a human, a forum is a huge help.

Forums, are of course, just one form of user generated content, but thanks to sophisticated software, you can use your forum to handle all sorts of such content. The most recent version of vBulletin (3.7) has many social networking like features, it also has a robust plugin system and can integrate with blog, gallery, and review products. It is also easy to appropriate vBulletin’s user authentication system to power custom sections of your own site, saving you programming time and allowing your users to have just one login for your whole site.

For any site that is going to be built around user submitted content it will be hard to find a better CMS that a properly modded vBulletin forum.

Finally, forums are amazing tools for promoting other sites. You can market your other sites or products to your forum members and build sales and traffic that way. Additionally, you can use a tool like the vbGeek Autolinker to turn your forum into a link popularity machine. What the script does it turn select words into predefined links to help you build link popularity. For instance if you own a forum about widgets and a site that sells widgets you could have the word “purple widget” turned into a link to your page about purple widgets in any post that uses the word. I’ve used this technique to get great rankings for some of my ecommerce sites, in addition to the direct traffic it provides.

So, buy a forum, or build a forum, but get one, don’t wait any longer. It may take awhile to grow, or it may shoot up instantly, but almost all forums eventually become successful.

Here are some related articles that may be of interest:
The Ultimate vBulletin Optimization Guide
Should You Pay for Posts? Forum Posting Services Reviewed
Your .Community – A Guide

I’ve talked about this many times in regards to content sites and ecommerce sites. The idea being the content site gains the traffic and the links and while you will make money off it, the goal is just to break even and earn your profit with all the traffic you send to the ecommerce site.

However it also works with two content sites, if one is more profitable you can build a secondary site to help promote it and only aim to break even on the secondary site while the first one brings in the dough.

Once a long time ago there was an issue with the Google toolbar where pages on a popular domain would get a high PageRank based purely off the weight of the domain. This was very commonly seen on Geocities. The root cause of the issue was that the pages were not yet crawled and so Google had to guess at a PageRank to display in the toolbar. They don’t do that anymore but it caused many people unwarranted glee way back when. Still, being the scientific soul that I am I had to test it so I made a mini site directly related to one of my sites and stuck it on Geocities. In the end, once it was crawled, it got a really low PR. But I also got it some incoming links, decent ones, including one from DMOZ, and linked it to my site. It at it’s peak was actually ranked in the top 10 of Google, and is still in the top 20. This, for a site I put 2 hours into one weekend years and years ago. It is of course peppered with links to my main site on the topic and to this day provides great on-topic PageRank and traffic.

I’ve done other horizontal expansion things as well. I have my sword ecommerce site. I then bought The Fantasy Forum which at the time was an extremely popular place to discuss collectible swords. I also have a dinky little medieval costuming site that is meant to carry tutorials on making your own costumes. It only has around 6 tutorials, but that free information does attract good links and okay traffic, and of course it links to the sword site. I have a new manufacturing business too that is also going to be swords, another horizontal expansion, and my existing traffic & customers from these sites will help there. Finally I have a couple medieval fantasy based games in the works and if they’re ever finished that’ll provide a nice new source of traffic for my ecommerce sites. Oh, and a third ecommerce site related to the genre as well.

Then I’ve got my little growing gardening network, this one is newer. I started with a gardening blog, I’ve mentioned it before here how it gets a lot of respect despite not being too old or having a lot of posts. Namely for being #1 for “gardening blog” on Google so when companies are looking for blogs to advertise on, or bloggers are looking to fill out their blogroll, I’m easily found. This results in the site gaining a good amount of incoming links (I’ve had an easier time link building with it than any other site I’ve ever owned). I later expanded it until a relatively still unpopular article site and forum (not that different from Website Publisher in truth). This expansion though is very much a “for later” type of expansion. As I talk about in my longevity article I’m thinking very long term here.

Then I opened my first (and not my last) gardening related ecommerce site, and being able to promote it with my content sites makes the job of promoting it much easier.

Now, I’m making a third mini network. In addition to gardening I also like to cook, and I like to cook healthy food. Not like rabbit food, but burgers, steaks, man food, I just make it healthier. My main new site, which isn’t launched yet, is a nutrition site but it takes a unique angle rather than just another article site or calorie counting site. Then I decided, you know, I like to cook, I might as well make a cooking blog. This will help promote it, so I’m doing that now as well. Cooking & nutrition aren’t 100% related, but they’re close enough that I should be able to get some cross promotion mojo going on.

The more sites you have in one niche, the easier your promotion work will be, and I’m not really recommending you putting the same content on multiple sites, that’d be spam, technically. Rather I recommend making different sites with different content but within the same niche, or to pair up ecommerce sites and content sites. The rewards are great.

The following are some ways to do just that:

Yellow Pages
This is by far the most effective one. All of the “old school” industries advertise here, as well as most of the new media companies. A great place to comb through page by page and section by section to find that one great market with very little competition online.

Billboards
While no where near as effective as the phone book, billboards feature a wide variety of advertisers spanning many different industries. Always keep that in your mind while you’re on the road. You can find billboards hosting ads for anything from truck driving schools to beauty schools.

Shopper Newspapers
These are the small newspapers that sit outside restaurants and grocery stores. From front to back the pages are filled with advertisements for local companies and services — a great source for ideas.

Paid Programming
Ever up at 4 a.m? Turn on basic cable. You have a good chance of learning how to consolidate your debt and how to buy real estate, but if you get lucky you’ll find some unique service or product being pitched. Research the industry and perform your due diligence — this is how I found mesothelioma.

How do you find ideas?

At the end of the article I recommend constant tinkering and monitoring as the best way to increase your earnings, and today I experienced something that really drives that point home.

This year I’ve been working on redesigning most of my content sites (and yes Website Publisher is on my list). The site of the moment is my literature site. The new design went live on most pages (but not all, it is a huge site and the integration is a lot of work) late last night.

When I first launched this site back in 2000 I redesigned it practically every 6 months, but then in 2002 I launched the most recent design and it stayed. Over the years I tweaked the content layout slightly, moving ad placements or adjusting them, but it stayed mostly the same. Most recently I did a few months worth of ad monitoring and tweaking as a foundation for the aforementioned article.

So, because of all my recent tweaking with the ads I thought they were pretty well set and I did not even think that I’d get much of a bump in eCPM with the new design. I was hoping the new design would entice more incoming links, maybe more page views per visit, and would certainly load faster being tableless, but an eCPM increase never crossed my mind.

So I was certainly surprised when checking Adsense this morning to see that the top Adsense leaderboard placement had a CTR double what it normally is, and throughout the day today it has held. Consdering that this is my highest earning ad placement for all my sites it’s like Christmas in October.

You can see the old design here and then compare it to the new design found here.

Not a whole lot has changed, but the little change there is certainly has made a difference. The top leaderboard was always near my horizontal menu, but with it now being directly touching my horizontal menu CTR has shot up. It is only a shift of 50 pixels, but wow, what a difference.

So, take this as inspiration to tweak your own site design.

Forum discussion here.

Well, after hiring a CSS designer and witnessing the birth and completion of an entire website in CSS, I can say that I was completely wrong. I am now a full supporter of 100% CSS layouts. And here’s the reasoning for it:

1. My bottom line. While most CSS designers are more expensive to hire than old fashioned table designers, I save money in the long run with the bandwidth I use. Short term pain (paying more for a designer), long term gain (saving more money every month on bandwidth).

2. My parents. My parents still live in the house I grew up in — which is in the middle of the woods. They’re unable to subscribe to a fast internet connection, so they’re still browsing around the web at ISDN speeds. When they call me and ask to see the new sites I recently built, I’d like to show them sites that load instantly. CSS drastically reduces the load-time on all connections.

3. Clean, easy to update code. Seperating code and content really does save a lot of time when updating a site — more time than you can ever imagine until you actually experience it.

Those are the three (3) main reasons for me personally — others have their own. Because of these reasons, as well as those not mentioned, are why my designers and my company only design 100% CSS sites from now on.

When most webmasters think of making a content rich site, they think about something they like, such as video games, or Stark Trek, or dogs and cats, who knows, but the bottom line is that the majority of them are left with content rich sites with small amounts of traffic, and even smaller amounts of income coming in from Google or Yahoo. So my advice to those people looking to broaden their income streams and branch out with some new sites, take a look around and pick a few of the millions of niches that exist in your every day life, that you overlook because it doesn’t make cajillions of dollars. Niches are everywhere, it’s just a question of how you open up your eyes and consider the possibilities that exist when you look for one.

As long as you accept that you won’t make $50k a month with your site, but that you’re okay with making say $300 a month per site, what’s stopping you from making 20 more sites just like that one, for all of these sub-niches around, thus increasing your monthly revenue to something like $6k a month. See, volume is the key to real revenue and profit success on the internet.

Not all of us can think of that one golden site idea that will net us millions of dollars each year. Instead, if we want to strike it rich, or at least be a full time webmaster, it’s the volume of smaller, less popular industries and niches that can still help us achieve that big check in the sky that so many people hope for.  So with that said, finding niches is not as tough as you thought it was. Just do your research, and when you come up with a list of say 10 niches from your look outside, start looking them up on the search engines, and ask yourself “can I make at least $XXX each month with this site?”, hell you can set your income goal to $30 a month if you really like, and from there, what’s stopping you from taking that $30, and re-investing it into 5 more domains? This is the “secret” I think to truly making money on the internet, without breaking the bank and allowing yourself to have a long term nest egg of internet income on your side, so that you are free to explore other ventures or hobbies, without the fear or worries of how your site will make money online.

One of the most common mistakes new site owners make (seasoned webmasters and newbies) is putting too much advertising on a brand new site. See, whenever we make new sites, as a website owner, our first goal is to make back whatever cash we’ve spent on the design, development, hosting, marketing, etc.. It’s time my friends, to break out of that mold. If you are making a website for profit, what’s the first thing you need to focus on? Generating revenue is probably the most common answer.. Wrong! Traffic. In order to make money, you need traffic. You can have the world’s greatest amount of content, the greatest design ever, the most fluid scripts running, but without the traffic, all you have is an empty chunk taking up space on a server.

Whenever I have my designers make sites, I always tell them — “Be sure to build the layout so that if I need to add ad spaces, I’ll be able to without ruining the original layout design”. Rather than building it with the spots in there first, my goal is to build up user loyalty on the site, and then slowly add my ad spots. This goes for all of you YPN and Adsense users too who think that text ads aren’t that noticable either. They are, even to stupid surfers.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t put any ads on your site, because even I go crazy with them sometimes. But I am saying that when you build a site, don’t go crazy with ads everywhere. You shouldn’t be in a rush to make money. Treat your website like you would an infant. I know it’s a strange reference, but it works. When you think of your website as the baby, and the traffic as the food, you wouldn’t feed your baby crappy food just because the label says it will make the kid grow quickly right? So why would you do something like posting a cajillion ads on your sites? All it does is annoy the end user.

So with that said, all of you internet revenue cowboys out there should probably hold off on putting pop-unders, and flashy banner ads on every empty spot on your new site. Your best bet is to take a step back, look at your site, and try and build up traffic first. This way, when it’s built up to a substantial level, then you can start to annoy people with your ads and really bank off the site. This method also works really well if you want to do private ad sales on a CPM or monthly level, because you’ll have a lot more return users this way.