Oy. You know, I’ve mentioned my flagship website previously and that I wanted to redesign it… almost a full year ago!

Now, that redesign is tied into the redesign of my eCommerce site, which is still in progress. The last time I mentioned it, I was adding the capability of using themes to the site. I think I’m about done with that. I just have to finish a secondary theme in order to test it out and make sure I haven’t overlooked anything. Once that is done, I believe that the redesign will be done as well. The eCommerce site will still need the shopping cart finished, but I don’t need the shopping cart capability in order to use the design on my flagship website. So, once I get the themes done, I can port over the design to my flagship website, tweak it to that site of course, and be up and running again. It should be relatively easy since little of the backend needs to change. Just have to juggle code around a bit to make sure everything shows up where it should.

Of course, one thing that has always been an obstacle is money. And, I’ve been guilty of chasing after money in various ways. I figured if I could find something that I could get a reasonably reliable amount of income from, I could fund my other projects and websites and really get them going better, when really what I should have been doing is just focusing on that site.

Instead, I read different Internet marketing forums and I’d read stuff on what you need to do and then I’d try these different things. It was what worked for the gurus and experts and all that, and many of them even claim not to be the sharpest crayons in the box so if they can do it, anyone can. And, I figured if they could do it, so could I!

So, I tried different things. Sometimes I’d make a little money here and there, but never did I make hundreds or thousands of dollars. Heck, if I could have gotten one site making $1 a day, I would have built 99 more and I’d be set!

Meanwhile, my flagship site has dropped from a PR5 to a PR3 and traffic has dropped off too. And, before I think even PR was coined by Google, I was doing pretty good with the site. There was a time when I had plenty of pages showing up in the first page of Google. For example, if people searched for information on my area, it wasn’t the local radio or TV station or newspaper that they found, it was my site. Before the local media had even heard of the Internet, my website was a top source for a lot of local information.

Of course, I didn’t have a way of monetizing it. AdSense wasn’t around yet, and banner ads were priced by thousands of impressions, not how highly ranked you were for certain keywords.

It’s not all been bad, though. If I had been concentrating solely on that site, I would have missed out on a lot. I probably would never have started this blog. And, I’ve met a lot of great people through blogging. I would probably never have gotten on Twitter either. Right now, I’m approaching 3,500 followers. The nice thing about that is that I’ve met a lot of great people that I probably would never have met anywhere else. Many of the people I’ve met in the blogosphere and Twitter world have great stories to tell, and I think that there is a great potential for some mutually beneficial sharing to happen when I get my site “reinvigorated”!

In fact, it was thinking about some of the people on Twitter that gave me the kick I needed to get back to this site again, instead of sidetracked with other ideas. I was thinking of starting yet another new site, and even registered a domain name for it, when it occurred to me that I could just tweak my flagship site a bit and get it going again.

So, that is what I’m going to do. I am also going to “deprecate” some other sites and blogs. Some, like LocoChihuahua.com, will remain, but others, such as RetroYears (much to Michelle’s delight, no doubt) will be culled.

And the long-term plan will be to merge the flagship site into this site (which only a few of you were privileged to see) for total Internet awesomeness.

I plan to have the site ready for a relaunch on January 1, 2009. So, stay tuned!

Oh, and the bit of advice from the experts that I’m not ignoring now… Sticking with one thing!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 12:52 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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