Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

I’m a programmer and have been programming in some form for the last 23 years.  Thats makes me sound very old, but I’m not!  I first started programming from a Sinclair Spectrum Basic manual in 1983.

Being a programmer has its advantages in that if I want to quickly knock up a website, I can - and I did that just a few minutes ago - partly for a small business idea, and partly to see how quickly Google can pickup a brand new website and domain name.  I reserved it about 20 minutes ago,  a small 3 page site is up and running and its linked into an affiliate programme - check it at warm legs.

Now you may wonder why I’ve got an interest in that type of site.  Well I heard on the weather this morning that its going to get colder, girls in the office were saying that they found it cold and I also received an invite to an affiliate programme.  The cogs starting moving, I did some checking of domain names and the rest you’ve probably seen if you clicked on the link above.

Bet you are wondering how this relates to the title of this post… Well for a while now I’ve been building up a portfolio of domain names - some quite good names, others have less potential but I plan to get a mini-site up for each domain name, do some basic content for each site, get the sites indexed and see what happens. 

If I’ve got say 100 sites and they each earn £1 a day, thats £700 per week, or £36,400 per year.

It took me about 20 minutes to get the domain reserved, got the site up onto the internet, so we’ll see later in the year how profitable that 20 minutes was!

I’m also monitoring how quickly the search engines pickup the new site as its got backlinks from some of my other sites and on some blogs I’ve read that people have reported new sites appearing on Google within 3 hours…  I’m expecting a week, but I’ll monitor and will report here shortly.

On two occasions this week I’ve had people ask me how often you should submit a site to the search engines, and what do we/Zarr charge for doing so.

If I was ruthless, I could lie and take the money…

However, I’m not.  The answer is that you probably never need to submit a site to Google, Yahoo or MSN as if you are linked to from any site, then you’ll be picked up automatically.  If you haven’t got anyone linking to you, you could always try Google Site Submission.

Just a side note in that if you submit a site using the Google Site Submission tool today, you may not appear in the Google results (even if you do a site:domain.com type syntax) for several weeks.

Just to expand on that, say if your new site A was linked to from site B.  The search engine robots/crawlers getting content from site B would find the new URL to your site A - and add it to the queue of what needs to be crawled.

The when a robot requests a URL to crawl and your site appears, off it goes to pickup your site’s content, indexes the content, finds all the links on the page and adds those to the list to crawl……… and so on.

In hours, days, weeks or months later when it next decides to visit URLs on your site, it will again index the content, find new URLs etc.  You can’t really influence the frequency of visits but the robots will return! 

Adding new content to the site on a regular basis will encourage them to come back sooner rather than later.  To give an idea of how many robots you can expect - one of my person sites thats got about 600 pages gets about 1200 robot visits a day on a normal day.

So answering the question I’ve been asked twice this week: “how often you should submit a site to the search engines, and what do we/Zarr charge for doing so.”

You shouldn’t as it will happen naturally after you first get indexed…  But be sure to add regular content and the robots will come back regulary.

For those of you living in the UK, you may have heard of 123-Reg which are one of the biggest registrars in the country - with lots of customers.

Their prices are low and like most companies, they have a control panel for you to maintain your DNS and other details.  Personally I don’t use them, and never have because I prefer the more comprehensive service of GoDaddy.com. 

But after buying an existing domain name from another person - who had it registered with 123-Reg, getting it transfered should have been a straight forward process.  I can only comment from the GoDaddy control panel, but the idea is that you make the transfer request, an email gets sent from GoDaddy to the administration contact for the domain with a Transaction ID and password inside the email.

The administrative contact then needs to supply those to the new buyer - and also the Authorization Code or EPP code from 123-Reg.

Not having had access to the 123-Reg control panel, I knew the authorization code was needed, but the person I was buying off said there wasn’t one.  In the end, and after searching Google for a while, I found the problem, and the solution.

Whereas 123-Reg make it very easy to move your domains to them, they don’t want you to move elsewhere and even their FAQs omit this common question of “how do I move my .com domain away from 123-Reg”.

The solution is to create a support ticket asking something like “please supply me with the EPP code or Authorization Code so that I can transfer my domain to another registrar”.  Depending on when you make the request, you may have a 24+ hour wait for the reply.

Why companies make it so hard to move their domains away I don’t know.  When someone wants to leave or transfer their services away, they’ve obviously thought it through and made their decision.  Making it harder to move away is only going to frustrate them more and never come back - or even make a blog post!