Friday Links

Quick favor to ask, I’ve finally finished off and installed a new theme on Coolest Gadgets and I’m after feedback, be it positive or negative. One of the aims of the theme is to make it less Adsense heavy and provide more space for traditional branding advertising.

Using all UPPERCASE in your title tag may look spammy but has good results in organic searches according to Connected Internet.

Adsense now lets you decline placement targeted ads using the new Ad Review Center, this is also cool just to see who is advertising on your site.

Cool post by SparkPluggin Wendy on how not to use social media.

The broadband crunch gets discussed on MSN

An ‘exabyte’ is a lot of data. It is 1.074 billion gigabytes of data, to be exact. It would take 14 million laptops like mine to store an exabyte. Two exabytes equals the total volume of information generated back in 1999. Today, the internet is handling one exabyte of data every single hour.

According to Blogstorm the iphone is almost sold out in the UK with a new 3G version due later this year.

Check out this unusual list of domain names owned by Google like GoogleReligion.com

This weeks game is also my favourite food, Papa’s Pizzeria.

About Al Carlton

Al quit the 9 to 5 rat race in January of 2007, before then he was a software engineer and systems architect of financial system. Nowadays Al spends the days running his various businesses and experimenting with different ideas and opportunities.
Al can be found on twitter at AlCarlton.

Comments

  1. Al, I deal with microdirect for recruitment. I see they advertise using google. Might be a good idea to get in touch directly.

    • Yeah you could use the Ad Review Center for that, might be breaking some of Google’s rules, I’m not sure but worth checking.

  2. Google seems like a religion with all it’s thou shalts 🙂

    That must be scary having the redesign done and removing some adsense blocks considering how much you make from adsense.

    I like the switch around and how the ads under the post on the post page have been cleaned up and put in an order. Very good!

    • Thanks Matthew, I’ve tried to minimize the scare by only removing the most prominent block on recent posts (5 days or so). That way it will hopefully be more friendly to regular visitors and from social sites who will hopefully become regular visitors, whilst I’ll still generate a nice bit of income from older content.
      The below post bit was a right mess before so I’m pleased I’ve fixed that, it took all of yesterday tweaking and hacking CSS.

  3. Beside the fact that it seems to ages (kinda) to load your site, I like the design. What is with the Sections in the upper right corner? Looks stange in IE7.

    • The load time is an issue I need to address, I think it’s caused by thirdparty javascripts (Tribal Fusion and possibly FeedBurner).

      When you say it looks strange in IE, do you mean the links: Forums, Get in touch, etc being slightly too high, or something else?

      Thanks

  4. Doesnt look quite right in IE6 either Al (im using the browser at work). The right sidebar appears to be displaying underneath the main content on the left, leaving a lot of blank space on the right.

  5. oooh it crashed my IE6 first time around, but I am using the All IEs for development testing. Couldn’t get the page to load after that.

    It also looks like you have 42 external javascript files to load and 10 external stylesheets according to the YSlow Firefox extension. That could explain the speed issue.

    IE6 does look a tad problematic though. Both CSS and Javascript possibly. Maybe some more condition statements in the html for IE6 could be used to sort those issues.

  6. It loaded fine with Firefox but the footer looks a little strange. The blue menu enters half way into the footer and the ad you have there (bottom) goes into the menu bar. Besides this minor thing, I like this design better than previous one you had. You maintained a similar aspects which is important for your users.

  7. You don’t have to take any of this feedback, but I think it might help. You have a great site, but the theme is lacking IMHO.

    -the firefox notification on top is not helping anyone. The theme should look right accross all browsers. The theme itself is not as good as it could be for sure. If I had as many subscribers as CG does, I’d definitely hire a professional to make something great.
    -Adding the lineheight property to your text will make things a lot easier to read for your users. Very easy to implement too. Also, going with your colors, I’d switch things around and make the headers red, and the links blue.

    Yeah, overall, I’d hire a really great designer to make your site look like a champion (and a champion in all browsers too)

    I love this blog btw. One of the better make money online ones.

  8. Hi AL,

    Don’t like the new look of CG.

    old one was the best and unique.

    The new looks boring like any other blog.

    More or less every blog is 3 catergory with categories on the left.

    Search word is not aligned in the field.

    There are lot more things a good tester can see I guess.

  9. I can’t figure out the stupid pizza game, I give up ðŸ™

  10. Al,

    On IE6 your sidebar is below the posts - Looks fine in Firefox (don’t have IE7 on the work laptop)

    The Forums/Get in Touch/About bar is not sitting correctly in IE6 the top is slightly hidden by the “welcome to coolest Gadgets” Firefox ad. The top of the letters are hidden so you can not see the top of the letter “F” in Forums for example.

    Hope this helps, I’ll do screen shots if needed just email me back.

    Colm

  11. @Stephen, Thanks I’ve just installed XP on a VM machine to look into that, I hate IE6

    @Garry, cheers for that

    @Jav, the bottom ad is meant to cross into the right sidebar other wise it wouldn’t fit, it can look odd though as it has 2 different background colors

    @SL - The theme was designed by a professional though I have modified it a little bit. I’ve had 2 pro designers work on it and then I choose what I thought looked best. I’ll check out the lineheight. Once the kinks are ironed out of this one I’ll let it run for a bit and see what other feeedback comes in. Thanks so much for your feedback.

    @braz - Thanks for taking the time to share your opinion braz. I know what you mean about a lot of blogs being 3 column nowadays, the problem I had was I needed more sidebar space and it seemed like the sensible option

    @Colm - I’ve seen the problem just looking for the fix now.

    @Rob - It was designed by a pro, though my tinkering may of spoilelt the look a bit. I have invested a good few $K into this, one of the designs I received ended up being thrown away.

Leave a Reply