Strix, that's fantastic!

Congrats Strix! It is so great to get the validation of your peers, and it does not hurt that you clients will be able to see tangible evidence of your madd skillz.

So today's bank site inspection visit has me all worked up! Yay, being in business for myself!

Now I want to look at how I actually use and how I want to use my office, since I have the time and space to do it from having to clear out for them to come in.

Hey, question for those who have created pages on FB for your business - only people who have Liked that page will see updates for it right? So, if I post as my business page, it's not going to show up in the news feed for people in my flist unless they've actually liked the busines page, right? I want to keep things separated, and I'm sure that's how it works, but just looking for reassurance.

Yup. Even if the like your page; they won't see all updates.Cause facebook wants you to pay.

To maximize the chane of people who like your page seeing updates, post all updates on a blog. Then make your updates sharing the blog posts. And ask some of the people who likes your page to like the updates. Maximizes the chances of those who like your page seeing the updates.

Thanks, Typo.

Okay, I need grade school level help here. Y'all know I have the provocateuse websites. They do pretty decently in terms of clicks. Between that and hotlinking, I was over my limits every month, and just a cool thing to do was suddenly costing me $300 extra! I put up solicitation buttons, but it felt weird (I don't interact with the visitors), and was obviously not something you can budget on.

Unsettling, not really a solution.

So I went with adsense. I can do that. All the sites have ads (not here! not here!). People are used to that, and apparently some click? Well, good! So I drop one in at the top and bottom of each ten image page, and the top and bottom of each index page. There's not really much more there.

In terms of drawing attention to the site, there is an RSS feed, but not publicised outside the pages of the site itself (and who casually uses it anymore?). And it's not broken down by interest at this time (of coding). And I post a picture, with ref links back to the source...well, I attempt once a day, but I also suck, so there's that.

I need to monetize, yo. When your web host comes back you and says "I'm surprised your back end page ever worked--you've had 1.2 million visitors so far this morning" there's a two pronged approach--get more invisible money off them (i.e. through showing them ads, and then if they like it and click--value provided--good luck with that...) and to fix the damned back end page so it doesn't crumble under a paltry million (hopefully not concurrent users).

I'm not asking about the latter so much as the former. Without even going into improving the site via program changes (I mean, don't not discuss it just because there are spaceships, but let's not get bogged down in hyperspace v. wormholes debates)

I'm looking at the automated suggestions and they suggest moving ads closer to the content. So this is a kinda typical short page: [link] . I can move a banner ad below or under the person's name, and below, it could come before the links to other sites of the same person. For varying reasons I don't like, but I like the last least.

The sides aren't that open on all the sites, though--my current min wiidth for pics was 600px, but now it's 800px, and sometimes a bigger one slides in.

Anyway. That's my thing. I've already started some SEO based on recommendations here--there's more name in the HTML, and as I collect pictures I try and work out a caption for each one, which definitely should help.

But now what?

Aidez-moi? S'il vous plait?

So, excuse the delay as I was distracted by the yummy. I claim no expertise on the placement of ads, but as far as the placement goes, I believe the frequent web user has acquired the ability to ignore them wherever they are placed.

So my uneducated suggestion would be to experiment with various options and see what works best for you. In your spare time, of course.

I would think the SEO would help.

I'd be okay with the ad under the category but above the name, although I don't know how much "closer" to the content that is. I'm actually okay with your least happy option, too. I think. Maybe I would have to see it. I wouldn't like the ad right on top of or between the pictures.

I'm gonna look at both of those, Liease and Laura--the idea that they might not care, because they're blind (or adblocking, sadly) means I might get away with what I consider intrusive, even. And I'll try with your placement recs, Liese.

I'm thinking of paid User Acceptance Testing (UAT). What do you think of the idea of asking 5 people here and five elsewhere (maybe on the Provocateuse tumblr) who have some tenuous link to the site and then 5 people who have none to spend 30-45 minutes going through as much of all and any of the sites they can, and reporting back to me their responses.

I'm not sure how much I should guide them with preparing a form. At work UAT is really specific. Here is a use case you need to complete to do your job. Here are the new steps. Could you work out how to do step #4? Was the documentation specific...that sort of shit that doesn't apply here.

Is $10 a person reasonable? I can't afford more than that...that's currently too much of one months ad money, but I want to put some of my rapidly decreasing brain cells into this while I can.