Chris Brandrick

Before I begin, just a quick word, hoping you all had a good Christmas.

For the first in a series of blog reviews I will be taking a look at DailyNintendo.

DailyNintendo, as the name suggests, is a blog which concentrates on aiming to deliver daily news about the popular videogaming company Nintendo. The site appears to have started posting Nintendo news back in March of 2007 and since then has been reporting various informal tidbits of information at a healthy rate. Despite having a healthy flow of news, it is worth noting that this rate is far from the advertised ‘daily’ (more so every couple of days), maybe something for the site writers to work on in order to stay true their name.

In terms of design the blog has a simple layout which appears washed out and unfortunately somewhat bland. The world of Nintendo is bright, colourful and fun, maybe the blog should reflect this. The header image is a positive step in the right direction, offering the visitor various imagery from Nintendo history (just refresh or visit another page), something no doubt any Nintendo fan would appreciate; although it may worth stylizing the DailyNintendo logo to increase recognition of the sites name and on a whole the sites identity. A splash of colour and a tweak to the logo will go a very long way.

Upon opening the blog, my eyes were immediately drawn to the Google AdSense advertisements on the right hand side, now this may well be down to my personal familiarity in dealing with AdSense, but the placement of these ads are very apparent and will probably result in very little organic clicks. The AdSense spots underneath each individual news post are much more effective, and no doubt receives more clicks. Check your stats and if so maybe consider removing that unsightly ad spot on the right.

At the very footer of the page a blurb of text quotes ‘Podcast Powered by podPress (v8.5)’, DailyNintendo may well have a podcast, but I can’t see it, and this is a problem as podcasts are great ways to bring return visitors and a superb way to interact with your loyal site fans. If the site doesn’t have a podcast, then why is it there? Am I missing something?

DailyNintendo is connected. Each post offers the reader the opportunity to bookmark it and add it to a wide selection of social sites, such as social news sites like digg and del.icio.us, and even networking sites like Facebook. This is a great way to get the site exposure. As expected of any blog you can also subscribe via the RSS feed, this is offered to the user via a small graphic on the right sidebar, and should be exposed more (bigger more attractive RSS image perhaps?) to increase readership; maybe even run a contest to get people to subscribe.

This blog delivers content at a healthy rate, but could be improved, as lets not forget, content is king. Spruce up the colours (Maybe a classic Nintendo red, or the Wii’s subtle blues?) and pay some attention to the logo. With these changes implemented no doubt your visitors will appreciate them, and no doubt you will too. Keep at it.

www.dailynintendo.com

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