Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

I’ve just come across these guys: http://www.websitestartupkit.com who are providing websites on a monthly basis - for less than £1 a day.

You get to choose from a set of designs, its got content management - but you pay monthly for it - rather than a larger sum to get a website to your exact needs.  So its a different business model from Zarr’s personal service with the “hand-holding” and expertise that we provide when developing a website for our customers.

If you run your own business, there is every likelihood that you work well over 37.5 hours a week, and probably 50+ hours is the norm.  Whether you do affiliate marketing, online sales, web design or whatever, having your own business means that there are always things you can be doing.

I love programming websites, or getting websites to “work” for me.  From my previous posts, you can see that I’m trying the “minisite” concept to get recurring revenue without doing “much”.  I also run a web design company which has numerous projects from standard content management or ecommerce to complex bespoke solutions.  So there are always things that I can be doing to extend these projects, or even something more mundane such as getting information together for the book-keeper to do our VAT return.

The one thing that I have done for a few years now is to work less, and try and work smarter.  Up until my daughter was born almost 7 years ago, I used to exercise 3-4 times a week (on a rowing machine) and from my log, I can see that stopped when she was 1 week old.  Since then, I’ve started sporadically for a few days or weeks here and there over the last 6 years, but never stuck to it.

From around summer 2008, I took up rowing again on my Concept 2 rower.  The first few weeks were crippling and extremely hard work as I didn’t realise how unfit I was.  Since then, I’ve steadily extended what I do, and now do about 50Km of rowing a week, split into 5/6 sessions of 35-40 mins a time.

There is one problem with this though, and that is that I prefer rowing in the evening, but whenever I row, the endomorphins come flooding out and it can take 5-6 hours for me to feel “tired”.  So take now, its 9.30pm and I’ll row after typing this blog entry, have a shower, do a bit more surfing or programing and then go to bed at about 2-3am and then be up about 7.30am to get my children ready for school.

But… for me, there are several benefits to doing this exercise.

1. I physically feel better for it and after the age of 30 you realise that your body is a lot less responsive to change, unless its to expand if you eat too much.

2. I need less sleep and when I do sleep, I close my eyes and wake 4-5 hours later feeling refreshed and ready to get up.

3. While your body is doing the exercise, I find that its a great time for your mind to think things through and reflect.  I’ve quite often think of solutions to problems which I’ve been stuck on for ages earlier in the day, or had Eureka moments.

Even if you work a normal office 9-5 job, but don’t exercise, I’m sure you would feel the benefits of doing regular exercise - you’ll feel better for it, you’ll look better for it and you’ll have a sharper and more focused mind as a result.

Several people I know (males) play 5-aside football once a week, or alternatively you could try a Concept 2 style rower, join your local gym or even just going for a long walk!

I can see the revenue increasing steadily on my minisites, and I’ve been experimenting a bit with the placement of my adsense units.  Google have a really good page that has a heat map showing the best placements.  All I can say is that following their advice (on the sites I’ve followed their advice), I’ve seen an improvement virtually overnight.  So if you use Adsense, please take a few minutes to read it.

I’ve also been working on a tool to quickly build and rollout a new website.  I’ve got well over 100 domain names which need websites and its a bit of a pain to set each site up, setup a few pages manually, add basic design etc..  Its the kind of thing that you think the first few times you do it that it only takes a few minutes, so not worth spending hours coming up with a better solution.  Then after having spent a lot more than a few minutes getting 10+ sites up and running, that better/automated solution looks much more appealing..

So now I’ve got a mechanism where by simply adding a domain name to a database table, I can have a website up and running, fully content managed, optional blog with ping update services, seo optimisation (set metakeywords, description, title tag etc), customisable navigational menus, Google Adsense placement and Google Analytics tracking - all within seconds, and fully customisable from a password protected adminstration area.

As an example, check out my sites on dna testing, insurance offers, visual basic 6, 5 aside football and offers and discounts.

I’ve also decided that we are going to make this new “site creator” into a standalone product.  I’ll disclose more details here when things are finalised a bit more.

Saint Valentine’s day is only 9 days away and probably the next “big” even after Christmas for some retailers.  For florists, chocolate manufacturers or even companies selling weekend breaks, I’m sure it will be a much appreciated source of sales with the credit crunch.

On a side note, Zarr’s web design has been extremely busy so far this year with lots of existing customers deciding to expand or give their websites a face-lift.  The overall trend so far this year seems to be that the Internet is still seeing growth and an important part of any sales campaigns or marketing for existing businesses whether they are bricks and motar, or purely online venture.

The domain name industry is also busy with lots of domains being sold for £x,xxx’s.  We also sourced a great domain for one of our clients which perfectly fits in with what they do.  Although the domain name was substantially more than the normal registration fee for a domain, I think it was extremely cheap.  I’ve also been able to buy a few more domain names as they dropped and bought some others from people who were looking to reduce their portfolio.  So some more mini-sites will be coming to the Internet over the next few months!

Some people have asked about how my minisites are going..  The majority of them have Adsense as the main income source, although my flights and travel guide site is the main one using affiliate programmes.

Adsense revenue is now running at about $280 US Dollars per month, or $9 per day from 3 main sites.  Not fantastic, but still about £200 UK pounds per month, or £2500 per year.  Not enough to retire on, but better than nothing.  The good thing that I’m seeing though is that traffic and adsense revenue is steadily increasing without much effort.  As it does, I expect revenue to continue to rise. 

We’ve been in discussions on doing some web design work for a local company who are looking to expand into the every increasing area of healthcare products, including care beds which includes hospital beds, nursing beds.

They’ve got several mini-sites, each of which feeds through to its main business website - but its interesting to see other businesses exploring the minisite ideas off their own back!

There are several sites that provide a list of domains that will “drop” on a specific day, or within the next few weeks.  A “drop” is when a domain is deleted from the central database and made available for someone else to reserve.  Millions of domains a year are registered and many are not renewed for a variety of reasons.

For .UK domains, they normally drop around 99 days after the expiry date.  So if it expired on 1st December 2008, it would be dropped 99 days later and available for anyone else to register.

For popular domain names, they will have existing backlinks from other websites, and may even still have pages indexed/cached with the major search engines.  Good backlinks are worth their weight in gold and being able to snap up a domain name gives you great head start.

I susbscribe to a few sites that list upcoming domains that are due to drop and when skimming through one list of 10,000+ domains, I noticed one in particular from a quite high profile company that went bankrupt in May 2008.

Now I know that quite a few “domainers” out there are doing exactly what I do and look for these good domains.  So to see if I could get the domain within a few minutes or seconds of it dropping, I used a drop catching service.  I paid £30, gave them the domain name, and when it was due to drop and sat back.

I then forgot about it until watching a news item about Woolworths stores closing which reminded me.  I checked and it had been caught by the drop catching service!  A few hours later, it was transfered to me, I setup DNS and pointed through to my Flight Offers and travel advice site and the domain was active again.

I’ve done some more research since and I can see the domain I caught is listed on quite a lot of websites including lots of existing travel sites, Classic FM, and a few blogs and several other good resources.  I can see in the site stats already that I’m getting some traffic, but getting these good quality backlinks will hopefully boost traffic for me - way beyond the £30 it cost to obtain the domain..

As you may know, Zarr have developed a wide variety of websites including lots of ecommerce ones.  November/December is the busiest time of year where a large proportion of people jump online to get their christmas presents cheaper than in the high street.

The UK Chancellor (who is responsible for the finances of the country for those living outside the UK) announced earlier this week that from 1st December, the VAT/Tax rate on goods sold will reduce from 17.5% to 15%.  The reasoning for this is the 2.5% saving will encourage people to buy more and get the economy going..

This VAT rate reduction means that website owners need to change their prices.  So yesterday we emailed all our ecommerce customers to see if they needed our help to quickly change all their product prices (we can do updates direct to the database rather than doing it manually).  About 80% of website owners are going to keep prices the same, and instead change the excluding VAT price.

So if something was £117.50 including 17.5% VAT, they will still keep it at £117.50, but instead keep the additional 2.5% as profit from the VAT rate reduction.

So although the government’s plan was to get consumers spending, from our research it will mean that businesses will get an extra 2.5% profit and the end-consumer still ends up spending the same amount.

I’m sure that the highly paid government workers/ministers who put this idea forward have spent time fine tuning how this fits into the bigger picture of the government borrowing £ billions to try and keep the economy out of recession, but I have my doubts as to whether its going to work..

On the up-side, all of the ecommerce websites that we’ve design and host are doing well in the run-up to christmas with several beating last years income by a large margin.

For those that know me, they will know that I’m never that far from a can or glass of Diet Coke and I drink between 1 and 2 litres of it a day.

Over the years, people have said that I’m drinking too much caffeine, but trying to find out how much caffine is in what I drink, compared to say someone who drinks coffee has been very difficult and I’ve only been able to find the answer in the last few days.

By drinking 2 litres of Diet Coke a day, that equates to about 275mg of caffeine a day.  That may sound like quite a lot, but a cup of tea could give you 92mg or coffee 168mg.

So drinking three cups of tea a day, OR one and a half cups of coffee would result in the person consuming the same amount of caffeine as 2 litres of Diet Coke.

I’m classed as a heavy consumer of Diet Coke - but thats fine by me as I don’t drink any tea or coffee so caffeine-wise I’m not doing too much harm…  I do know that soft drinks do have other chemicals in them which are far from the pure-ness of water.

Its been running for 5 days so far and if you watch TV, you’ll probably have seen highlights of the Olympics during the day.  As the Olympics are 1/2 way around the world (I’m in the UK), they’ve pretty much finished for the day by the time we “wake”.

Trying to find out about those more obscure sports, or specific details or even video highlights is pretty difficult - something I thought wouldn’t be the case this time around..

So my top lists of sites with the latest Olympics news and results are:

1. BBC Sport - a comprehensive site, updated pretty much in realtime, live video streaming, event highlights.

2. The Official Website for the 2008 Olympics - unfortunately quite slow at times.

3. CNN news site with general information and links to other resources.

If anyone has any other good links, please leave a comment!

Although its August and supposedly the peak of the summer in the UK, its raining again and has been for the last few days.  Infact its more like winter than whats meant to be the hottest time of the year.

The papers have today said that one of the biggest threats to the UK is the flu virus which could kill 750,000 people. 

So with bad weather, and lots of bugs around, make sure you get your vitamins and supplements - and yes, its another new minisite.