After spending a lot of time and money on modification to Art From Steel we learnt that the current setup cannot run under PHP5.

Our webhost will be disabling PHP4 next month and rather than spend more time patching up the current site, we’ve taken the plunge and upgraded both Joomla and VirtueMart. to version 1.53 and 1.1.1.  Whilst these numbers don’t seem like much, those with experience can attest that the upgrades make huge leaps forward from what we’ve previously worked with.

We’ve spent a lot of time with Joomla over the past few months and have an excellent understanding of how to configure it.  We are able to put a functional site together with a nice template, valuable components and modules within a couple of hours now.  We then need to add content and get custom graphics created.

We’ve built 4 sites in the last 3 days.  They all require more content, graphics and tweaks before they’re ready but we’re delighted with the increase in our productivity.

We are working on these new sites in the background and once things are ready we’ll activate them.

A few features we’re excited about on most of these sites are:

• Improved site designs with modern clean images and styles
   
• Improved coupons and gift vouchers
   
• An integrated blog for each major site
   
• Improved shipping cost calculations
   
• Accounts for wholesale and retail clients with different prices and order quantities
   
• Testimonials:  text, photos, audio and video
   
• Reviews and star-ratings for each product
   
• Integrated link pages
   
• Mailing list subscriptions built into the member registration form.
   
• An RSS Feed for each site

As these sites get completed, expect more updates from us. Realistically we’ll be moving nearly all of our significant sites to Joomla over the coming few months.  We are huge Joomla fans and love how easy it is to modify and expand site that use it. 

We have over 20 websites online and have this week been updating and adding links pages to many of them.

If you have related websites then please get in touch if you’d like to reciprocate links with us.

If your websites are relevent to ours then we will both benefit by gaining traffic from our sites and also by indirectly increasing your search engine rankings.

We were delighted to have acquired the domain Telecommunication.biz today.

It was available for auction at fortunately for us it did not attract much attention and we got an excellent price for it.

We are already developing a brand new communication-based website however Telecommunication.biz is an excellent domain that we’ll build a simple 1-page website onto this week.

We don’t have any immediate plans to sell the domain as it should increase in value over time.  We do however have some good connections in the telecom business and may consider selling it in the future.

Today we learnt of a clever way of sending PayPal funds to avoid the 3% transfer fees by using their Mass-Pay feature.

This is only practical if you want to save the RECEIVER paying funds but it’s a nice and legitimate little work-around that most PayPal users don’t yet know.

The only downside to this is that it only works if you are paying from your PayPal balance.  Credit-Card funded payments do not work.  It is also only available for Business and Premier account holders too.

Read the full information here.

Heres Your Info is a very simple 1-page site that we created to get some value from the domain name.

Unfortunately with our personal Adsense account still suspended (and we’re not optimistic about it being restored any time soon) the custom search engine we previously created no longer worked.

Instead we’ve inserted the search form for ‘Google Scholar’ to the page.

We won’t do any marketing for this site but hope to at least generate a little page rank and adsense revenue to cover the domain renewal fees each year.

Forward to Us is one of a few domains we were pleased to have acquired.  We have no plans to make money with the site as really we’re just hoping that it’ll gain page rank and generate enough passive income from adsense to pay for the registration fees.

Although the site’s been online for a few months already today we added banners, adsense and a logo so that we can remove it from our to-do list.

We plan to just watch the site and maybe do some simple marketing of it over the coming months.  Ideally we’ll be able to sell the domain in a few years time for a profit.

Rather than spend time updating the Adsense code for Calls.in.th we looked at the traffic stats and realized that this site has had it’s day.

Calls In Thailand was the first web venture we created and was once responsible for generating profits of over $5,000 USD per month. 

The site was written in a now-discontinued CMS package called TTCMS and we’ll always remember the fun we had with the main web designer who had a nervous breakdown as he worked with us.  One memorable conversation was when the man’s wife packed her bags and left him as he was communicating on messenger to us.

Calls in Thailand was created in 2001 and it’s a site we were very proud of.  In 2001 CMS scripts were quite rare and our site really was cutting-edge for its time.  We generated money by referring visitors to our United World Telecom website (where we earnt residual income on member’s telephone calls.  We also had a very exciting time pioneering VoIP calling-cards in Thailand - many years before this became legal :o).

Unfortunately we awoke one day to discover that the Thai telecom monopoly had decided to compete against low-cost providers like us.  Overnight they slashed their call prices from about $1.50 per minute to just 35c.  We were offering calls for about 60c a minute and we couln’t in good conscience keep recommending the services we offered to our clients.  We still retained some very large clients who preferred working with us and needed the anonymity that our callback service provided but our client base dropped from many hundreds to about a dozen over the space of a month.

To overcome this challenge we then commissioned our United World Telecom website to market the same international callback service but to a worldwide market.  This business has generated residual income over $500 every month with zero work for about 4 years now and will be expanded in the coming few months.

We have now redirected calls.in.th to our United World Telecom website. 

After an unprecedented number of obstacles we’re delighted to announce that Art From Steel is now processing retail orders online.

We still have a few more revisions to make to the site which include …

1. Adding Google Checkout
2. Implementing a completely new coupon system
3. Reducing the number of products displayed per page
4. Re-formatting the ’search results’ page 

Things appear to be working well however we’ve not yet announced the updated site to our existing members.  We’re gonig to spend a week bug-testing, training staff for the back-end order processing administration and then we’ll make a more public announcement to members.

We appealed against the closure of our Adsense account on the basis that it was completely unjustified.  Seems like Google’s policy is to imply that you’ve done something bad but "for security reasons" they won’t tell you what it is.

Our appeal was met with Google’s automated response of …

Thanks for providing us with additional information. However, after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we’ve re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we’re unable to reinstate your account. Thank you for your understanding.

The Google AdSense team

Again we’ve responded but, after much research online it seems that the simplest thing to do is just to look for other revenue earners.  Our monthly income from Adsesne has never been more than $200 and we’ve only ever used it on site’s that we are lazy to update.

As an experiment though we applied and were accepted for a new Adsense account in our business name.  We’ve listed exactly the same websites as with our previous account and got approved within 24 hours.

Whilst it will be impossible to trust Google Adsense again we’re going to replace our now-expired adsense codes with our new codes.  We are curious as to whether Google will acknowledge that our sites are legitimate and adhere to their terms now that we are presenting them with a corporate face instead of a personal one.  Over the next few months we’ll likely phase-out Google Adsense and replace it with advertisements from other providers.

Our Make-Money-Online website Geekcrets.com is now back in Google’s index after a holiday of about 3 months.

Although it’s a low-priority site, we’ll be completely re-writing everything in Joomla 1.5 so that nearly all articles are updated and available immediately for free.  Monetization will be from contextual adverts, affiliate links (and maybe Adsense).

There’s no immediate plans to revive the site but it should be within the next 4 months.