Bring me Sunshine Monkey

Apr 28, 2008 -

monkey Bring me Sunshine Monkey Its been a while since my last blog update, mainly because there hasn’t really been much to say and I’ve been a little busy doing stuff for a change.

I was lucky enough to spend a few days in Portugal courtesy of Paul, not realising that the reason I was asked to go over was actually to entertain children for 6 days! As in typical Frostie fashion, I managed to miss my plane home (thanks Keith for waking me up) and had to pay a crazy sum of money to get a flight 4 hours later. Still, was all good fun, especially mopping up sewage following a down pour.

Whilst away, I managed to get a few hints and tips from both Paul and Shane which has resulted in a new website being created in WordPress. I think they were both shocked as whilst away, I did manage to get a fair bit of work done, and created a new site completely, whilst starting another that is of both interest to me personally, and makes use of one of the most active merchants out there – Sunshine.co.uk.

Thanks to Chris and Happy at Sunshine, I have managed to play around with all of their affiliate tools, and have even made use of their RSS feeds showing the latest special deals they have for certain resorts. The site also incorporates Simply Scuba widgets which Amo at Affiliate Window kindly created a nice little besoke style for me (well, maybe he got his minions to do it… I don’t know).

So Scuba Diving Egypt went live and somehow, after only 4 days, my new website and new domain name was ranking 5th in Google for a pretty generic search term. Now I need to start on some serious link building, so if anyone out there has a travel related website and they’d like to swap some links, then please get in touch! In the meantime, I shall continue with content and design tinkering.

So if ever you hit a bit of a low, get stuck for ideas, have no drive then I can honestly say that week in some sunshine can really get you back on track :)

http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk KirstyM

What if you’re in the Sun all the time already Chris??? How do I remotivate myself?

Did you sleep in for your flight or what?
http://www.webaffiliate.co.uk Chris Frost

Kirsty

Yes its true. Sadly I did over sleep and miss my flight… a repeat of what happened a few years ago in Glasgow. I blame the sambuca and the lack of sleep the night before due to mopping duties :(

As for re-motivating yourself, do a house swap with me for a month ;)
Jonathan

Who do you host your WordPress sites with?

The hosting I currently use is quite good, but if I want to use WordPress I would have to upgrade my current hosting package to a much more expensive one, which puts me off using WordPress, especially if it is for a new site that I’m not sure will actually make me enough money to cover the hosting fees…
http://www.webaffiliate.co.uk Chris Frost

Hi Jonathan

I currently use Meir Hosting. They have had their problems in the past with availability, however the response from the support I can’t fault.

Despite a few hickups I’ve stuck with them for a few years now, and have a reseller account. I will shortly be moving to a dedicated server, purely for resilience reasons.

I am surprised that you would have to upgrade your hosting package in order to use a simple tool like WordPress. Who is your host at the moment? Have you tried installing wordpress manually, or failing that, in your control panel do you have an option for Fantastico?
Jonathan

Hi Chris

Thanks for the info – I’ll definitely check out Meir Hosting.

I currently use http://www.easily.co.uk for hosting my websites – Linux Standard package, which for £29.79 + VAT works fine for my websites. However, if I want to use WordPress I’d have to upgrade to their Linux Enhanced package at £52.75 + VAT. I tried doing this once but their Support was hopeless, but in the end I managed to upload WordPress (manually), but I must have done something wrong because the control panel didn’t look right, so I can’t really use it yet….I don’t believe it has Fantastico.

I guess I’ll just need to spend more time trying to fix it. I wish I could find a UK hosting company that automatically installs WordPress for you – just like the hosting companies (USA) that are displayed on the WordPress.org site.