I talked about Weebly in a previous post and have now had more time to play with it. It's a nice system and I have several test sites running on it. In fact, I was ready to switch several sites to it when I read their section on AdSense revenue sharing. What they say is they alternate showing ads with your ID and theirs. That means they receive half of any AdSense income generated.
I have sites that make more than $1,000 per month so that didn't look like such a great idea. I toyed around with limiting the kind of sites to those which generate their income from the Ebay EPN network and/or sites on which we sell our own products. That would work, but many sites earn from all three and I have to loose that.
I finally emailed their tech support and was told that as long as I insert my own AdSense code instead of using thier AdSense widget all the revenue will come to me. That is a much more satisfactory arrangement! Now I can get serious about building sites there.
I have purchased some old (1921, 1923) books on Silversmithing which I plan to use as the basis for a website about making money by doing simple silver work at home. I think it will make a great topic for these uncertain economic times because it includes aspects of precious metals investing, small business development, and profiting from a craft business.
I scanned the first one today and saved it as searchable PDF files. I uploaded one of those files to the Silversmith's Handbook using the embedded document widget. The file was large (51 megs) but uploaded without a problem. The Weebly system then said it was formatting and was busy for a while. Eventually it finished and I published the page.
The text/images I uploaded are now in a Scribd box that can scroll, display full screen, show multiple pages, and has a functioning search box. There is also a download button which is greyed out on my system but would be live if I had a Scribd account (I think).
What I need to figure out next is what a search engine spider will see when it looks at that page. Will it pick up all the text as part of the page, or is that an inline frame or other structure that the spider can't deal with. That makes a lot of difference in how well the site will rank.
It was a lot of work making the PDF and I am not sure I want to make it so easy for anyone to download. I need to play around with various ways of presenting the information before I finalize a layout.
In any case, this is still looking like a tool that will help me build a lot of nice sites quickly.
{ 0 comments }
