I haven’t updated these pages for a while with the new sites, so with quite a few just around the corner, time to get back on with the job!

Emaren Holistic Therapies came to us as a referral from another customer, who has had a site live with us for some months now. Helping to promote a new and growing holistic treatment business, it is simply to act as a point of call on the internet so that potential customers can learn more about what is available.

A key request was for plenty of purple to match the material used in the treatment rooms, with cream as a second colour. And that’s what she got!

                          

Have you ever wished for a piece of genuine, sporting memorabilia?

The problem with many of the sites from which you can buy such products is the authenticity. There are plenty of places to buy signed photos from, including the online auction sites, but are they the genuine thing?

Well this is the challenge that Tony is fixing with his new website. Selling only genuine sporting memorabilia, you can buy online safe in the knowledge that what you are buying is not only the genuine, hand signed product, but also well produced.

For a start, many of the items are framed by another customer of mine over at Gesbur Studios. And I’ve seen Glynn in action there – framing everything from postcards to boxing gloves and a lot more besides!

Customers also receive a photograph taken at the signing session of the personality signing the products. Details such as what pen they used and so on are also provided to help guarantee that what you are buying is the real thing.

But best of all is that Tony is friends with a lot of the players that he uses or at the very least working as an agent or with their agents, providing after dinner speakers (see his other site for information there!). So you really do know when he says they are the genuine item that they really are the genuine item.

                          

Actually, although the customer is new, we have already produced a site for this customer’s dad, and as always it is good to have referals from happy customers.

This website is just a point of contact for potential new clients of Maxine. Over time, as she gains further experience we can increase the size of the gallery and add more of a portfolio to the about me page.

But for now it is a good starting point. And if you need professional make up, whether it be for stage, performance or a wedding, why not see what Maxine could be able to offer for you?

                          

After a “little” more work than I was first told was involved in this website, it looks as though we have Voucher Nav up and running.

There have been a few changes along the way, but finally the business model is settled upon and the website is there. This website is totally different to anything we’ve built before, but has a lot of promise.

It basically will be offering members a different voucher every day – from either a business in Liverpool or Manchester. And that is where the fun began!

First, we have to limit ‘basic’ members to just 4 vouchers per calendar month. Next, we have to automatically upgrade members to ‘Gold’ when they pay, giving them better T&Cs and access to all vouchers. On top of this, each member can only download each voucher once and we have to produce a list of voucher ids for the merchant.

Then there are the Facebook links – depending on whether the member is interested in Liverpool or Manchester we have to link to the relevant Facebook page. And this is where I think the power of this website will be as it should be really easy to promote it in Facebook with a few simple tricks.

                          

Another new site is now live, this time for the insurance arm of a local financial advisor.

The purpose behind this site is very simple. On the whole they prefer to deal with their customers directly, to understand the needs and requirements. But for some customers it might be more convenient to use the internet.

Also, a lot of the existing customers work with other arms of the business, but not the insurance side. So shortly all of these existing customers will be contacted and told about the new site with its online quotation links and so on, and invited to visit it when they need an insurance quote.

                          

Talk about being busy after the Christmas lull. Here is a batch of 21 websites that have just gone live!

OK, a bit of a cheat calling them 21 sites, more a website with 21 pages, but each page is on its very own URL, so that counts as 21 sites!

This customer is the speaking agent for many sportsmen and wanted to ensure that bookings are reaching him directly and to give them a website address that they can mention, for example Nicky Summerbee on Talk Sport this weekend.

So the solution is this batch of websites. However, although they are published there is still a lot of work left to be done. At the moment the content is just standard write-ups. Over the next week or two, each personality is going to be researched and a 450 – 500 word write up produced.

This can then form the basis of their site, plus the content will be syndicated to EzineArticles and up to 30 blogs so that the sites get plenty of exposure and loads of links in. Hopefully, potential customers wanting to make bookings will then find the sites and be able to book directly with the agent.

                          

Given that in our first few years we had one or two Southport based customers with most being from Oxford and London (the bidding process we were using for new work must have advertised heavily in those areas), I was able to produce the following list of new Southport clients:

www.heatclub.co.uk
www.jsr-6-sigma-training.com
www.vacation-florida.co.uk
www.gesbur.co.uk
www.rtiroofing.co.uk
www.windowcareconservatories.co.uk
www.mackaybrothers.com
www.birkdalecycles.co.uk
www.homecarsofsouthport.co.uk
www.mandseyewear.com

What’s more impressive is that these have all been published (rewritten in 2 cases) in the last six months and these are just those that I am most proud of.

There are even more from Formby, Crosby, Blackpool and further afield and a few more in progress and probably others that I have missed. No wonder I have been so busy.

And as I have already stated, in our first 4 or so years nearly every customer was from miles away, so a great achievement to suddenly be growing locally, and without any advertising expense!

                          

Welcome on board to our latest new local customer – the Heat Club!

And when I say local I really do mean local in this case – I’ve been walking the half a mile to meetings about the site! Certainly our most local customer yet and showing our strong growth in the Southport area.

Anyway, Heat Club is a new site for a local plumbing company, that has been around since 1984 and has decided to leverage its marketing slightly more through a contact point on the internet.

Another page or two should be added in the coming months, but getting testimonials together is proving slower than hoped for, so we have gone live with the site in its slightly shrunken state.

Have a look at it and if you need a plumber in and around the Southport area, whether you be a business or domestic customer, the Heat Club should be able to help keep you warm.

                          

All it is is a single page website with a photograph of a prestige property that they roofed, a list of contact details and the services that are on offer.

What could get simpler than that? Well actually trying to lay out such a minimalistic website is no easy task, but it was fun and I think that the website does look good.

Rob will be using it mainly as a contact point for customers coming through other means, but it is also hoped that with time it will start doing well in the search engines. Time will tell.

                          

Just how important is web design for a real estate company? Can one survive without a top quality website? Is there an alternative, for example just being listed in some directories?

Well I say there is no alternative. For a real estate company a high class website is absolutely vital from day one. Looking at the ‘product’ on sale in real estate listings and it is a high priced product. But, the real estate company is not just selling properties, it is selling itself.

Take any other website selling a product these days. They approach a supplier of the products and place an order. The supplier will almost say yes to supplying the product as the business in question is paying them for the goods.

But, not a real estate company. Here the person with the goods is the seller of the house. It is the supplier that is going to be paying for the goods to be sold and the real estate company that collects, the roles are reversed. For this reason it is absolutely necessary that the real estate company does a good job selling itself.

These days it is so easy to find properties for sale online that it is likely that most people are going to perform initial services on the internet, from work or home. Most of the results will turn up through the large consolidation directories showing many agent’s portfolios, but when the buyer is interested they will then visit the agent’s website hoping for more information.

This is information such as full descriptions, plenty of photographs, floor plans, details about the local area and maybe even videos of the property. A veritable collection of information stored on the agent’s website ready to browse through and to make that decision as to whether to view. Information that has to excite the potential customer so that they arrive at the property keen to buy, rather than bore them and maybe make them not even want to visit.

This is a lot of information for a website to contain and it has to be well organised, easy to find and easy to load. The real estate company needs to be able to maintain this information to grab potential buyers to clinch the deal. If the website design is not good enough and the site looks below standard or cannot carry the required features, then this is going to harm the business, maybe even making the real estate company fold.

A website is, for a real estate company, a window into the properties that it has for sale. It will make finding the required property simple and allow for viewing plenty of details. It should give both buyers and sellers the confidence to pick up the phone and contact the agent, either to make a viewing or to instruct a new potential sales property.

A website is an essential. And the web design behind that site is very important to make sure that it sells not only the houses, but also the services of the real estate company.

                          

Even if you are using a theme, a blogger is going to personalise the new blog in a few ways to make the design the way they want it to look. But, this is where the design can go wrong in a big way for users of WordPress, by doing nothing!

How many blogs have I seen that say “Just another WordPress blog.” Go through the options of your new blog and check for that now – get it looking right straight from the start!

As for actual design errors, one of the first elements of the page design that many bloggers are playing with is some advertising. It is always nice to earn a little extra cash from your blog, whether it is just a hobby or intended as a money making system. So adding a few affiliate banners, Google Adsense blocks and so on is quite common. And you are allowed 3 Adsense blocks, a Google search block and more.

This means that the temptation is to throw a large add unit into the post and a few around the sides along with scattered half relevant affiliate banners. But this is a huge mistake. Look at professional sites and you will notice that they keep their advertising to a few key positions. By having advertising everywhere readers must wade through the adverts to find the content. This is not what they want. The average reader wants to find the content, not feel as though they are only wanted for their monetary value to you.

So to avoid the over advertising mistake, just keep adverts to one or two positions and include only those adverts that do really well.

The next design mistake is to have broken links. Not only are these bad for search engines, but they annoy readers. Yet they are simple to detect. If you are using WordPress look for a broken link plugin that suits your way of working, install it and fix those links. Broken links lose your credibility very quickly.

Still with navigation, the opposite is also true – not linking enough. Most blog themes will show a list of your recent posts, but that is not always what new readers want to see. They want to see your best and most popular writing. So get hold of a plugin to help you display most popular posts – either by the most read or the most commented. Also, link to related posts so that when a reader has finished the current post they have something else to go onto. This means that new visitors are steered around your site, staying on it for longer and maybe becoming regular followers.

Lastly, don’t get carried away with your post titles. Remember that some readers might be going through your RSS feed and all that they see about your new post is the start of its title. Make it good so that they click the title to read the post. If the titles are meaningless, they will very quickly delete your RSS feed from their reader.

                          

1) Do not bother to check that your new creation works in other web browsers! Just make sure it works in Internet Explorer.

Even just testing in your new website in one version of Internet Explorer alone is a recipe for disaster. The different versions of Internet Explorer can, with certain code, all render the website page slightly differently and all slightly differently to Firefox. Yes, half of users (in my stats) use a flavour of Internet Explorer, but about a third of visitors to my sites are using Firefox. So you really do need to check that the site works well across a wide variety of browsers. Fail to do this and large segments of the page can vanish or drop away from where they should be.

2) Design your website to fit on a wide screen monitor – 1920 X 1200 would be a great idea!

I do not know why people with widescreen monitors assume everyone has the same, but in my stats a quarter of all visitors use a 1024 X 768 “normal” size monitor. If your design is based on fitting a widescreen monitor, then those with smaller screens will have to scroll up and down as well as left and right. I have seen it too many times and it is highly annoying, looks ugly and causes me to leave the website in seconds!

3) Have a different layout for every page of the site to keep visitors on their feet. They will love the constant changes and movement of navigation.

It might look clever to have lots of different styles to the pages, but as a visitor it does not give a good feeling. The lack of consistency across the pages mean that the navigation can be moving and hard to locate and each new page style effectively feels like visiting a new website. And this effect is horrible.

4) Remember Hogwarts and make sure that every possible image moves, banners spin and there are snow flakes falling down the screen. Oh, and have the mouse leaving a trail of stars.

One or, if you really have to, two moving images may add to a website. But when you start getting carried away there are so many distractions around the screen you do not really know where you should be concentrating on. The same with fancy falling bits to the screen and your mouse leaving trails of bits.

5) Save time going live and do not bother to proof read your work. Visitors won’t mind all of the errors.

When you have finished your website you must look through it and check that all of the text reads as it should do and, equally importantly, that it all fits as you expect it to. Something in the text could be too wide and pushing the layout out, or insufficient text not padding out a block which leads to chaos with the rest of the layout.

Just a few thoughts for you to be starting with!

                          

Frequently when I am building a website after the customer has looked at a few revisions, the topic of conversation drifts to the fonts that should be used on the website. This is the time that the fun really starts to begin! Usually the customer has been browsing around Word on their machine and playing with a few fonts there. So the question is put, “Can we have ultra curly school boy graffiti font for all of the headings and…”.

Stop right there! Go no further. The problem is that whilst this font might look stunning on your website, what will it look like when your customers visit your website? And here is the problem and it is preceded with a technical explanation.

When you open a website the style sheets dictate what fonts, or font families, should be used within the various areas of the webpage that you are opening. But all that this code does is to refer the browser to the list of font that you already have installed on your machine. So if you have installed ultra curly school boy graffiti on your machine then you will be able to see that font when you open the page. But, if this ultra fancy font is not installed on your machine, then the default will be used.

So to be safe, when planning what fonts to use on the various elements of the page it is safest to stick to just those fonts that are installed on the majority of machines and will appear roughly the same. Here we are looking at not only the different versions of Windows machines, but also Macs.

This means that the list of fonts that are compatible with the majority of users is very limited. There are plenty of sites that list most of them and allow you to see what they will appear as, but the choice is very limited.

Which is why we then get to a list of standard fonts that we see in use on sites time and time again. Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Garamond and so on.

Sadly, this list does mean that the fonts we get to play with are not that exciting, but if you want to be displaying the page as text, then that is the rule that we have to abide by. But, there are alternatives. For example, if you are designing banners, logos and other elements of the page then these can be created as images on your computer and this gives you the freedom to experience any font that you can find on the internet. The downside – well images are not accessible to search engines and accessible readers, so the content of the page cannot really depend on such techniques.

You could use graphics for headers and supply an alt attribute for search engines and those unable to read the graphics if you are desperate to use a fancy font. But, aside from this cheat, the best fonts to use when you are creating a website are those boring and frequently used fonts listed above.

                          

Factor 3 – How Complicated Is The Look?
A website with many complicated flash animations, fancy graphics and a different look on every single webpage is going to take a lot longer to build than a simple, clean looking site that can be built in a matter of hours. I can, as a rule, build a simple clean looking website style from scratch in about 4 hours. It is the iterations after that point that take the time!

Factor 4 – How Many People Are Reviewing The Website?
This is an unbelievable factor in the build time of a website. All of my longest builds have had a group of people deciding what the new website will look like. The quickest have been built for a sole trader.

What happens is that the primary contact looks at the site, has their input with the designer and puts their stamp on it. Then the next person in the committee then gets involved, wants their ideas and changes are made. Then the next person and the person after that all do the same. One website alone was restarted 5 times as more people got involved in deciding what the website should look like.

To Answer The Question
A small website can easily be built in a morning, but as you add in extra pages and features, take time to supply multiple drafts of the content and add in a more complicated look to the site and get more people involved in what it should look like, the build time increases exponentially.

                          

There are several factors that will affect how long it is going to take to build your website. Here are some of the considerations.

Factor 1 – Size Of The Proposed Website
Obviously, a 1-page website will usually be a lot quicker than a 5-page website and both a lot quicker than an ecommerce site or even a huge directory with many features. There is no reason why a 1-page website cannot be built in a day, whilst a 5-page website could be built in a few days, depending on the rest of the factors.

Factor 2 – Is The Content Ready?
All too frequently the style of the website can be ready, but the content is not ready or is an early draft. Often, the content is put in place and then redrafted many times. Obviously, on those websites where the content is ready at the start or a content management system such as WordPress is being used, then the time to get it ready is only hours to days. If many drafts are needed then weeks or even months can elapse.

Continue to part 2.

                          

When building websites we need to know what browsers the site is likely to be viewed in so that we can test the site in that browser. And this is information that moves constantly, so probably well worth a quarterly review, following the review of screen resolution from 2 days back.

For example. Last week I was asked to make a change to a site (that I had not built!) and happened as part of my testing to open it in IE6. The site did not work at all and the navigation is missing, yet my stats show that about 7% of internet visitors still use this browser.

I have looked at the visitor stats (from Google Analytics) for a handful of my own websites over various niches. Hobby, sport, travel, home business, business to business and finance were all covered. In all, over the days monitored, this was 5,222 visitors.

As expected, Internet Explorer accounted for most of the visitors at almost 51%, with 31.6% of all visitors using IE 8 and 12.5% using IE 7. I would have expected to say the rest use IE 6, but even IE 5.5 was recorded! Someone is asking for security problems there!

Firefox held its own and on some of the websites it was reported as more frequently used that all of the Internet Explorer variants put together. Overall, I saw 32.5% of my traffic using that browser, which is good as that is my browser of choice and what I develop in!

After that we really do hit minor traffic levels with Chrome showing under 8% (only just beating IE6 on 7%), Safari on 5.8%. Mozilla on 1.3% and the last I included was Opera, on under 1%.

Looking at the individual sites, these stats near enough follow through. Sometimes a browser is slightly more popular on one site than another, but that is more statistical discrepancies than actual favouritism.

So, if you are developing a website, what browsers must you test on? Well Firefox, IE8 and IE7 account for over three quarters of all visitors, so these are a must. After that, it is how much will your budget spread and how much browser dependent coding have you got? I would say that if you can also test on Chrome, IE6 and Safari then you have covered about 97% of the internet population.

Mozilla and Opera would be ‘nice’ to include, although by this point you should just be confirming that your code is not browser dependent. But after that, it seems the other browsers have died off and can be avoided.

Hopefully, over the next quarter we will see a further break away from IE6 and that testing can almost be retired. It is quite interesting to look back to almost 12 months ago when 14% of the visitors used Firefox, 23% IE8, 40% IE7 and 14% IE6. Chrome, Firefox and IE8 have all increased their usage whilst IE6 has dropped to less than half what it was and IE7 to less than 30% of its usage.

The problem is, I can’t really ever see IE6 dieing out completely at the moment. Not until the people using it are forced into buying new machines. It looks as though about 7% of internet users are happy on an old browser and intending to stick with it.

                          

But, times move on and so do screens. I have been analysing traffic over 6 different websites of my own over a short period this month. These include technical, travel, sport and home interest sites, giving a spread of interests. The totals are:

Note: All ‘other’ sizes were larger than 1024 X 768.

So, what do I make of this? Well the old, reliable, 800 X 600 screen size is dieing off. Down in 13th place in my chart, with less than 1.5% of visitors to these sites using that resolution. The next smallest size I saw was 1024 X 768, most popular overall and in all but one of the sites, the most popular per site, averaging almost 1 in 4 visitors.

Bye, bye 800 X 600
I think that as the year progresses, we are going to see that stats falling for the 800 X 600 screen size. It is obviously no longer popular and as people move to laptops and netbooks with built in screens, those sizes are becoming more the norm.

1024 X 768 rolls onwards
But, the traditional 1024 X 768 still rules the waves! One site did see it in second place, just, and that was the sport site. And this does give a major clue as to where the bigger screen sizes are being rolled out.

The more business orientated sites are showing as many visitors using a 1024 X 768 screen as 1280 X 800 and 1280 X 1024 put together. But, the interest based sites see that gap gone, with almost parity across the three sites. This implies that business is being slow to update to the bigger screen that home users are enjoying. At home, you are likely to have a 1280 screen.

Affecting our design decisions
So, how does this information affect the way that we should be designing websites? Well, I think it is near enough safe to say that when we design a page, we no longer need to stick to 800 pixels wide. We can now safely fill the 1024 screen width and allow for a padding of up to almost 900 pixels on the width!

As for depth, almost 3.5% of visitors were using only 600 pixel deep screens. If something cannot scroll (popup windows etc) then I would think that this is enough visitors to make you stick to that size. But, then the rest can see 768 pixels, so if we design on a 1024 X 768 screen we see the majority.

The future is the exception
However, there is one major exception that I have intentionally overlooked in all of these. One slight little white lie in the table above. On one website, hidden in the top 20 screen resolutions, was a small screen size of a mobile device. So our desktop computers might be getting bigger screens, but what about our mobile computing!

Food for thought.

                          

For those that are not wanting or able to pay the full amount that is requested by a professional website designer, it is still possible to get yourself online with a suitable piece of software for an Ecommerce Web Design if you wish to.

There are a whole array of DIY website tools available to choose from, many offering free trial periods. If you want to try your hand at website design and want to build your own website then these are the places to start. Look around for a website that you feel you can work with that offers a suitable free period. You might see free trials from 10 days to 30 days. Just remember that if you sign up for a service with just a 10 day free trial that you must get on with the project straight away – else your free trial will be up and you will not have built the website and won’t know if that is the site for you!

But, I do sometimes feel that this is actually a good idea. On those services with a 30 day trial, it is tempting to put it down for a few days, get held up and forget to come back. With any such project you need to set your deadlines and work to them.

But what features should you be looking for with an ecommerce website builder? Well, does it cope with your level of technical expertise? Do you have to get technically involved or is it just click and point? Does the tool assist you in the development of a logo and the layout of the site? Do they offer a wide enough range of professional looking templates, or are they just offering 2 templates and leaving you to do the rest?

Getting the look right is the hardest part of building any website so having sufficient quality looking templates is essential, unless you are artistic and willing to work from scratch.

Then, there are other consideration to look at. How many products does the service allow you to hold? Is there a limit or are they unlimited? Does the limit cover the number of products that you carry? And how easy is it to back all of this up and do they do that for you? One wrong press of a button can delete the entire product database, so backups are essential.

Also there is the integration to a payment system. An e-commerce site is nothing without a shopping basket and payment system. Most will integrate to PayPal, but what about other options? Can you choose to use other methods, if that is what you wish to do?

And with any DIY website builder tool, whether you get stuck or not during the free trial period attempt to contact their support desk! You might just need to do it for real in the future, if you cannot get through then what will you do then?

                          

If you are building a website, whether yourself or with a website designer (or friend), then at some point professional quality images are going to come into the conversation. But, where do you get them from?

Most people go down one of two avenues. Either they look at their competition websites and copy images from there, or they search Google images and incorrectly assume they are safe to use what they find.

But, as one customer demonstrated yesterday with images she thought were safe to use, this is far from the case.

Let’s look at the copying images from your competition problem. Nice idea, but what when they pop along to your website to check it out? Don’t think they will check it out the same way that you have checked out all of your competitor’s websites to see what they are doing?

If they see a load of images taken from their website they could be offended. If they have employed expensive professional photographers to take these pictures, then they will rightfully feel their copyright has been breached and could try to sue you. Or if they think you are copying them and have bought the images themselves, they could report your website to wherever they bought the images from themselves.

What if you just copy from Google Images? Again, very unsafe. I have heard of customers doing this and accidentally picking up copyright photographs and then the original owner has tracked the infringement down. There is software on the internet to see where images have been used for just this purpose.

So, if you can’t copy the images because of copyright, never mind if a customer sees two websites with the same photographs they are going to get confused, what do you do?

Well I opt for pictures from a couple of profession stock image libraries. Each picture costs $1 / $2 to download and use on as many websites as I want to forever. But, there are loads of reasons for doing this.

First, I know I am safe with regards copyright infringement. I have bought a license and the places I use insure me so that if someone has loaded a picture they were not allowed to use, it is not me that foots the bill.

Second, there are a huge variety of just the very best photographs on offer. They are stunning photographs of a very high quality and attention to detail. These professional images beat anything I could take hands down.

So, where to use? My favourite is iStockPhoto. Around 6,000,000 high quality images, not too expensive, a free image every week and easy to use. Second I use Fotolia. Not always as good quality, but maybe slightly cheaper per photograph and loads of free images per week, although some not really that professional looking.

On the whole, unless supplied by an advertiser or a screen shot, all of the images you see in this blog are the professional images supplied by one of the above two sites (like the one above!) – either the allocation of free photos or photographs I have used on customer websites.

Avoid the courts. Make sure that you pay for your quality professional photographs!

                          

WordPress.com or WordPress.org?
First, WordPress are no longer allowing users to use the hosted version of WordPress if they are selling sponsored posts. How far they take this – whether it gets as far as disallowing affiliate advertising – I do not know and if the situation changes in the future we can’t know. But for security, I would recommend avoiding the hosted version if you want to make sure your web site will always thrive.

Hosting WordPress.org
So we are looking at the self hosted version of WordPress. There are two options here, depending on your technical abilities. If you are happy with FTP and buying a MySQL database, then you can use any host you like. But if this sounds too complicated, then look just for hosts that will install WordPress at the click of a few buttons.

Once you have your host, then you might also buy you domain name. Along with setting up WordPress, your web site is now up and running!

Finding Some Vouchers
There is no point in merely displaying random voucher codes if the purpose of the site is to make an income. You will only want to display coupon codes that relate to sites running affiliate schemes and you will just be allowed to display approved codes. So sign up to a handful of the biggest affiliate schemes you could find and then apply to all of their relevant merchants.

They will then email you as voucher codes go live. You then only write a new post and type in the code and all of the details. Do not bother with click to reveal – it only annoys people. Only give the full details on your post. The affiliate scheme will provide you with banners or text links for the merchant. Only copy and paste one of these into the post.

Attracting Traffic To Your Coupon Website
Search engine optimisation techniques are likely, but will take stacks of effort! At best, maybe optimising for merchant names and the word voucher code might help for people looking for that merchant’s banners, but you need to build on the powers of the blogging tool.

Instead you need to build a following and this is where blogs excel! If you can attract some traffic to your new WordPress web site, then people will start signing up for you RSS feed. So make sure that your posts about new vouchers clearly name the merchant and the coupon, so followers might pop by when there is a coupon that appeals. But, where do you get these traffic from to begin with?

Well start taking part in other discount code sites and forums. Be the first person to post round excellent codes that you know about, giving the full details on the forum or in the comment so that it does not become blatant self promotion. Just rely on the avatar linking back to your web site, or adding a link in your signature.