Need Community Support

I haven't updated the site blog in a while due to the previously discussed server/host issues. They moved my site to another server and it doesn't seem to be crashing any more but the response time is still slow. I will just have to make do until I get enough traffic to justify investing the money in a new host.

So How Is The Site Going?

Well I am feeling much better about it than I did when I wrote my last blog entry. Visitors were dropping off dramatically  because of the server outages. 2 days during that 2 week period with 0 -2 visitors ( its like a roller coaster)

It appears, touch wood, that I am back on track. Each day this week and most of the time since the last blog update we have reached an average of 40 visitors a day.  As I write this it is halfway through my servers day and there has already been 35 visitors.

That average of 40 excludes yesterday when we had 140 visitors.

Since the last update I created an add-on for Firefox, it is just a search plug-in for the site but because this is a site that depends on its internal search I feel it is important. It is also a way of promoting the site.

I believe it has had about 150- 160 downloads so far. It has been public for just over a week. If you read this and you are interested you can go to the Mozzilla Firefox addons listing for my sites plug-in.

Geo-Targeting

Oh yeah, almost forgot,  I implemented geo-targeting for the product listings. I set a cookie based on the visitors IP which gives me their country. At the moment this is used to send them to the correct Amazon or eBay site. So far I have only really done the US, UK And the AU. Later , because each region has its own on-line retailers and tools  I would like to provide localized helpful links to users of the site . An example would be "static ICE" in Australia. Static ICE helps people find the cheapest place to purchase a product locally to them. I want to use my geo-targeting to provide links to helpful tools like that in each region.

I Need More Community Support

Yep I need more comments , voting and submissions of every kind.

If you read this and you think you will find the site useful in the future then help me out by posting a link in StumbleUpon, twitter, your blog, a forum, facebook, myspace , anything at all.

The More visitors I get the larger the catalog of products and issues becomes , more input helps me make the product listings more accurate.

Layout Change

I changed the layout of the front page.

When the site was having server issues I noticed that the 1st item on the front page was very well indexed (The HTC review shows up in the first search page of google in certain regions of the world)

I have made a view to show the most complained about/defective products determined by users votes. I have set this to the top of the page to broaden the sites visibility on search indexes when looking for issues associated with those items. I will leave it like this for a few weeks to see how It goes.