Make Money Online - The CaymanHost

22/09: Are Browsers Misrepresenting Your Blog

You might be surprised to find that a great deal of it is not being shown to a number of your visitors, particularly if you market affiliate programs, display third party advertising, and rely too much on javascript.

I was reading Seven Easy Steps To Speed Up Your Site at Raiber Christian.com and thought it would be a good idea to fix some of the minor issues I knew I had on some pages, before it got too out of control. I was also keen to check out some things mentioned by Josh Spaulding on how to avoid leaking pagerank.

I was over at a local business today, using their computer alongside my own. They are still running that old dinosaur IE6 as a browser and it was, in fact, this very computer that made me realize one of my sites had horrible display issues in the IE6 world. That was eventually traced and fixed and now I am a regular over at browsershots.org when I make changes to my sites! What I noticed today however, was a far more worrisome matter. I should say that I am no expert in coding, programming or anything technical and I'm sure that if anyone with expertise were to analyze some of my web pages they would have a fit of apoplexy at the errors and non compliance with standards they would surely find. However, from the mouth of an amateur, here are a few things you may want to think about for your own pages.

This all relates to security settings which will vary enormously from one computer or network to another and from browser to browser. Below is a partial screenshot of my main page over at The Cayman Host as seen in Firefox or IE6/7.

You will see in the third column across, a run of banner ads for half a dozen hosting companies (top three only visible). These do not appear on the machine mentioned - only one banner appears (I use the Wordpress plugin Got Banners to rotate these banners each time a refresh occurs, giving  equal exposure to each web host). Worse still, a great deal of my affiliate banners, in particular the CJ ones, simply do not show at all. I can fix this by uploading these to my server, but as a lot of them change regularly to reflect offers or discounts and the like, this is not an ideal solution. I then discover that all links to CJ's domain appear to be blocked, so even hosting images on my server and using PHP redirects for the links, which I already do on most, has no effect whatsoever beyond ensuring the creatives are displayed, leading to a dead end. 

Javascript ads were being blocked (not uncommon) and there were several chunks of text missing. This is not great, but at least it doesn't  make the site look broken, it's just missing  the javascript content. Bidvertiser was just one example, and was fixed by reverting to HTML. However, trying to use a common tracking service for the links resulted in nothing but a glaring "The Page Cannot Be Displayed" screen. I have no idea why the security settings would be doing this and my only way around the problem is probably going to be using alternative redirect methods, probably PHP, for those affiliate links. This means a fair bit of work and inconvenience. I did see that there was a Mcafee site monitor product running which at one point threw up a warning that Bidvertiser sent "spammy emails". Personally I think that kind of tactic is very poor form, based, it would seem, purely on individual opinion. 

Amazon associate links were fine so presumably they are not deemed a threat to anybody's sanity or wallet, at least not according to whatever security settings were operational at the time I was surfing...hmmm.

I accept that the site relies heavily on affiliate programs, but it annoys me that people can mess with my design in this way. I would say that the owner of this machine is probably not your average internet user, and it is a business machine rather than a personal computer. However, a lot of users with very little technical knowledge could easily be using software or settings that mess with a page's overall look and feel. I imagine them arriving on my page, seeing "broken" links and missing images and immediately leaving, thinking that it is a poorly maintained, out of date neighborhood and that's pretty disheartening.

It makes you wonder just how many people who click on a link because they are intrested in a product or service just end up on a blank page. Those visitors will be lost to you, probably for good. It's a depressing thought, that having earned the traffic and the visitor, you can lose them so easily to issues almost completely out of your control.

If you think your site(s) might be suffering similar problems, maybe it's time to check them out and correct what you can, even if it's almost impossible to know who is viewing what anymore. All you can do is try not to use too much javascript, make sure that most of your image files are hosted on your own server and use good quality redirects on affiliate links. That's not news to the more experienced, but it hopefully helps if a lot of this is unfamiliar to you.

Additional advice from better qualified readers is, as always, more than welcome.

TCH

FREE DOWNTIME WITNESS SOFTWARE STILL AVAILABLE

FEEDGHOST CONTEST STILL RUNNING