Make Money Online - The CaymanHost

Hi Maurice,

You're right, I missed the Archive button at the top. That helps some. If you can do some sort of sitemap listing of post titles with your blogging system it might help even more.

The IE nag might work as a 125x125 button on the sidebar.

Thanks for reviewing my review of your blog.

Hi Frank

You made some good points and I'm looking into a sitemap solution. The sidebar is getting pretty crowded (again) which is always a problem with a design like this.

I hope the quick overnight solutions have gone some way to improving things but I intend to work on it a little more when time permits. Thanks for the Stumble traffic BTW, always appreciated.

Here is my tiny review. Your content is excellent, top notch! Your navigation does need some work (I'm not sure if the drop-down category menu is SE friendly?) but as you said, not using WordPress makes it all a bit more difficult.

I think Frank made a good point when he stated that it's hard to figure out the overall intention of the blog at first. You should feel special lol because I remember the first time I saw your blog. I wasn't sure if it was about the Cayman Islands, a personal blog, an internet marketing blog or what.

That's not to say it's appalling or anything, it just takes a bit of reading and searching to really get a good understanding of the overall intent.

I've considered using a similar site translator, but I always remember how my wife couldn't stop laughing the first time she read a German translation from one of those translators lol One thing that keeps me thinking about it though is the loads of extra content and potential SE traffic.

Anyway, you have an excellent blog Maurice. We can all find a thing or two wrong with other blogs and it's great that you've open up the floor for reader suggestion.

btw, didn't you have the Feedjit widget before? I just put it on my blog. Did it cause problems are did you just get tired of it?

Hey Josh

Thanks for the positive comments. I do think the review was pretty fair myself and I don't think anything written was not constructive. You bear Frank out on the poor navigation and possible confusion for first time visitors. The pretty picture probably doesn't help. I'm working on both aspects. I've now added "related posts" to the foot of all entries now too. As to the drop down menu, it may not be SEO friendly, but when one sidebar is all you got and there's already too much below the fold that shouldn't be....something has to give.

The translation idea.....I initially believed the same as you - think of all those non English speakers out there, help them to read my blog, expand my audience. The thing is, the number of clicks is almost non existent so it's usefulness is questionable. I've no doubt the machine translations are probably so poor as to be of little use. I think its days are numbered.

I removed Feedjit the other day when I was cleaning out my sidebar and rearranging some things. Considering all the javascript in there already I'm not sure I'll put it back. It never caused any problems at all and was always very quick to load and I like the real time reporting it displayed.

Thanks again and have yourself a great day :-)

Maurice, that seems like a really useful review. I might ask for my site to be reviewed as well - I just need to fix some things first. :)

Interestingly, I hadn't really noticed the issues that came to light, because I normally read in the feed and only come over to comment. The issues highlighted all seem to be things that need to be fixed. But as Josh says, your content is excellent.

I you ask me (and you did!), the biggest thing that annoys me about the blog is the lack of a subscribe to comment's feature. I know you don't use WordPress, but is there some other solution? Should I be using coComment or something?

Did you just add the Web Money and Marketing to your header? Or was it always there. Anyway, this helps people work out what the site is about.

I'm thinking of offering free reviews myself, but from a more technical angle. It's just an idea at this stage and I've got lots of other stuff to do before I get to that however.

Hi Stephen

Hope all is well in China :-)

Thanks for the feedback. Subscription to comments is something that has been bugging me for a while. It is one of the most useful features for any blog, but unfortunately there is no plugin available for me to use here. I'm going to put it on my wish list over at the Nucleus forums in the hope that someone might develop one for us.

Until then, CoComment is one option, although some people don't like it much. I use it beause there are a lot of blogs that don't offer the option, even Wordpress bloggers.

As for the header, yes, in another response to the feedback from people I've tried to clarify what it is I write about. Glad it didn't go unnoticed!

Hi Maurice,

Things are great here - hope all is well there on Grand Cayman as well! I've been meaning to tell you that my Alexa rank is 226 (in the Cayman Islands). :)

I hope you can get a subscribe to comments like feature for Nucleus. I've got checking out CoComment on my (very large) list of things to do. In the meantime, I'll keep coming back to your site every so often to check...

Hi Stephen

I did have a plugin installed that I thought was doing the job, but it wasn't working correctly. I spent last night messing about with it but to no avail. The subscribe to comments option was collecting the email address and sending an email for users to confirm their subscription, but it didn't pick up new comments and email the subscriber a notification. All it did was notify of new posts.

I'm trying to figure out the problem.

I don't even have an RSS feed for comments so I really need to sort something out. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, because I think this is an important failing on my blog.

Congrats on the Alexa CI rank :-) that's pretty good going, the last Aussie I saw commenting on this was happy to be at 1800 and something - last time I looked I was holding on at number 8 but it doesn't translate into many CI visitors!!!

Good luck on sorting out the comments issue - it would really help get casual readers hooked on the site. If they're just passing through, they won't bother to come back and check the other comments.

Now I'm scheming how I make use of my Alexa CI rank! Are there any fancy restaurants there that you 'don't' go to? Maybe I can sort out some sort of advertising with them, maybe: "Maurice! Take your wife to Chico's!" :)

Hi Stephen,

Thanks, it's times like these that I wish I was clever like you and could just write a damn plugin myself :-)

Your dastardly advertising plans for CI are thought provoking. It's all good fun though so let's see..... Durty Reids has just re-opened it's doors in a new premises (if we don't meet your standards, kindly lower them) maybe they would buy a spot from you :) They serve a mighty fine shrimp dinner there and I'd be happy to tell them you sent us to assure you of regular ad space renewals!

All the best to you, have a great day!

Durty Reids it is. I'll ask them for 5% of all your spendings if I can get you in there with a targetted ad campaign (at you, I think your my only CI reader). Heck, I'll ask for 1%, that would put me ahead of my Adsense earnings :)

Are you suggesting I have a hefty bar tab? Perish the thought :-)

Perhaps you could persuade them to set up an affiliate program and supply a nice 125 X 125 banner, that will help. I'll put it up on my blog with your ID embedded and I can click on it from time to time to remind me where to go! They can track my visits based on the time of the click and my arrival, then reward you on a sliding drunkeness scale or similar. Maybe special incentives for meals ordered or return visits within 48 hours. They'd need to plant a cookie on me...oatmeal is preferred, which I'd have to promise not to eat for a month or so......yes, maybe it could work!

I'm sure you'll eventually develop other ways to make money online Stephen. I'm going to put together a few more posts on the matter after Josh aired the same thoughts as me about blogs and revenue generation.

Thanks for the laughs :-)

Stephen,

If you get back to this you'll see that I have integrated CoComment onto these pages now.

It's maybe not the best solution but I still can't get the "subscribe to comments" feature to function and I'm tearing my hair - what's left of it - out over the cursed thing.

Hopefully, the option to subscribe to follow up comments via RSS and CoComment is at least an improvement over nothing at all. I've tested it and it seems to be functioning OK but if anyone encounters any problems please let me know.

If you are not familiar with CoComment, just click on the blue link below to visit their site and find out how you can track your online conversations.