Chris Brandrick

As some of you who follow me on Twitter or have me added on Facebook may have realised I am now back in the UK, after my holiday away to Turkey. I had a really nice break away, and you can now check out the pictures of my trip on my Flickr page, I also have some on my Facebook too.

Now I’m back I would also like to announce that Kufu (as previously blogged) is now officially open for business, and we are on the look out for new clients. So drop us an email!

In addition to working for Kufu, the rest of my summer will involve finally getting Gamebrit off the ground, which has been ridiculously delayed for several reasons, it’s amazing to think I have had the domain for nearly a year now! But yeah keep an eye out for updates on that one.

But in the mean time, keep it on ChrisBrandrick.com! Subscribe to my RSS feed, or even add me as a Technorati fave.

It seems in the past two months my blog hasn’t seen much love, but rest assured this isn’t down to me fleeing the online scene, in fact far from it. Since moving house back in April and finishing University for the year in early May (exams, fun!) I have been in the process of starting up a design company with three other good friends, all of which have a good background in design, coding and of course running a business.

The company is based in Lincoln, UK, and last week we finally moved into our office in the heart of the city center. I am currently in the process of designing the companies website and hopefully soon we should all be ready to go. Kufu is the companies name (or Kufu Design if you so wish), and we are on the look out for clients to get the ball rolling, so if you need a design making, a whole site coding or something more simple do not hesitate to get in touch and help us out as we start out. You can find us at Kufu.co.uk, which currently has just placeholder contact details up, but keep an eye on the site as it will be changing soon.

Let us know your thoughts!

Apologies for the lack of updates in the past week, it’s been a busy one!

Goal number eight in my goals for 2008 is to launch gaming site Gamebrit, I briefly mentioned it in the linked blog entry, but today I am going to go into more details as to what to expect.

Development on the site began just before Christmas, with the basic design being completed (see blog image for a sneak peak). The site is currently functioning and running on a good content management system, currently I am just adding content, and of course games into the database, which is taking far more time than I would like. I could outsource this menial work, but trying to keep costs down is key.

The site, as you may have guessed is going to focus on gaming, specifically within the UK. I hope to eventually be able to interview, and run features on UK game development houses and studios. I have successfully gained a foot in the UK gaming industry before (although a small one) so I see no reason why I cannot do it again with a more focused site.

In addition to the aforementioned CMS, which I will touch upon in more detail in a later post, I will also be implementing a forum to hopefully gain some community around the site; a collection of UK gamers, interested in the development of the UK in the gaming industry, oh and bloody good writing.

I initially wanted the site to be ready this month, but due to lengthy input processes I can see this being knocked back. Either way I will keep you updated on it’s progress, this post was really just to let you know, and because I am excited about the opportunities the site will bring. Any questions or comments, just leave your thoughts in the comment section.

Last year I blogged about the numerous domains I had acquired and that I really ought to do something with them instead of just buying them, and letting them expire, going unused. One of these domains was http://www.gtafour.co.uk, which I intended to use for a blog detailing any news about the release of the upcoming game GTA IV.

My intentions didn’t flourish into anything other than mere good intentions, and up in till now the domain has been unused. The game (GTA IV) is released at the end of April, so I now think it’s somewhat late to start a blog, so in order to gain some sort of justification on purchasing the domain I have added a simple page online. The page simply shows the games boxart, a youtube video and some affiliate links to preorder the game. Hopefully the website will receive some traffic (UK based) and generate some revenue via the play.com affiliate links.

In an attempt to drive traffic to the site and hopefully gain some sales leads I have decided to give Facebook advertisements a try, and to test the water on how effective they can be I am running a campaign on Facebook tomorrow targeting 18 to 30 year old males. I will be sure to update on how effective Facebook ads are and whether I would use them again. Hopefully the results are positive!

Oh and if your feeling generous and want the game, feel free to preorder through GTAFour.co.uk.

The high definition market is huge and is finally starting to spread it’s wings here in the UK thanks to Sky HD and the upcoming Freesat service. Me and a partner of mine currently hold several HD related (mainly .co.uk) domains which are currently for sale. The domains available are as follows:

5hd.co.uk (Channel launches Autumn ‘08)
channel5hd.co.uk (Channel launches Autumn ‘08)
fxhd.co.uk (Channel launches Spring ‘08)
luxetvhd.co.uk (Available on Sky HD)
luxetvhd.com (Available on Sky HD)
mtvhd.co.uk (Channel launches Spring ‘08)

Some of the domains have been appraised by top appraisal service Sedo and fall in the £xxxx range. If you are interested in the possibility of acquiring any of the above domains please feel free to email me using the below form:

Back in July I posted about my Halo 3 blog, Halo Three UK which has now been running for over a year. As predicted in the earlier post the blog would reach the peak of it’s popularity around the games release (which for those of you that missed it was in late September).

Up to the release of the game content surrounding speculation and details on features, levels and more was ripe and easy to find. Blog entries where thick and fast and the visitors numbers reflected this. In the months before the game was released the blog was hitting an average of 6,000 to 7,000 uniques. During the release month of September this figure doubled.

Since the release the visitor figures have dropped, and that is understandable as so have the blog entries, which again is understandable. The blog is still updated but less frequently due to less relevant content being available. It is still making an income from sold text links and affiliate links.

This entry reaffirms my predictions on how the traffic would fluctuate around release, but shows that even with some small effort a blog can still pull in healthy visitor numbers and turn a profit. If anything running the Halo blog has been an interesting experiment in seeing how interest in websites which concentrate on consumer goods vary around their release date.

Over a year ago in a rather impulse moment I bought a turn key site from the NamePros forum for only $10 (£5), this was merely an experiment to see if on a personal level I could make any money from such a site, especially considering the bad reputation they have with other web designers.

The site I bought focused on Weight Loss and after optimizing the placement of AdSense, performing some SEO, and submitting it to various directories and search engines the hits started rolling in. Admittedly the site was not enjoying a huge amount of visitors but it was more than I expected. The site continued to make a small amount via AdSense, and more than making a profit for what the site was costing me to run.

In the summer, the domain I had (weighty.info) expired and unfortunately I did not renew, thus rendering my SEO and other work useless. Despite this I decided I should still use the content I bought, and looked into new domains.

Recently I registered ‘WeightAdvice.net’, which not only do I think is better suited to the content, but on a whole is a better more brandable domain. So with this domain at hand, I decided to try the Drupal CMS, and upon installing it I am very impressed. (Drupal review coming soon).

My new site can now be found at www.weightadvice.net and I shall be posting content daily. Check it out, and if you have any comments or thoughts be sure to drop me an email or just leave a comment.

GoFirefox is a site I set up over a year ago to see and experiment with how much could be earned from Google’s Firefox download scheme. The scheme is part of AdSense and offers users the chance to download the Firefox browser with the Google toolbar pre-installed. The site is simply designed, offers a brief explanation of what Firefox can offer and of course a download area. The site has been bringing in a few dollars each day ever since launch and ranks well in Google for various Firefox searches.

I currently have both the .net and .co.uk, but the majority of travel comes via the .net domain. Currently my plan is to advertise the site some more (I currently have some banner ads in place on a site or two), and optimize the site some more to rank higher.

So that’s my (albeit brief) plans for GoFirefox, continue, promote, and so on…if you need Firefox (which you do) be sure to download the Windows version at my site. GoFirefox

Apologies for the lack of updates, it’s been a busy summer!

Tonight I sat down and went through all the domains I own, and I have more than I expected! I currently have 23 domains with 3 different registrars. More shocking is the fact that I only use about 10 or 11 of them. With this fact in mind I plan to sell them, or develop what I have in some way. Over the next few months I will be blogging with intentions about what I plan to do with the abundance of domains I have acquired. Keep a look out for it.

Vista Talk UK is a UK based forum for discussion on Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows Vista.

I first opened Vista Talk UK back in November of last year but never really gave it much attention, over time the forum has grown, and with a little promotion now has over 200 hundred members. Unfortunately I suspect half of said members are not genuine and are merely bots. The forum has little content, but I believe the domain and the few genuine members may be of worth, especially if sold to the right buyer.

Due to other projects such as Webmaster Play, Halo Three UK, and more I have decided it is time to sell on the forum. If you are interested in owning a Vista forum with a premium UK discussion based domain then feel free to contact me for more details.