Barry’s World

Archive for May, 2009

• Getting ready to cook some burgers. Have a Great Memorial Day everyone. #
• RT @barryreeves is giving away OptinPageGenerator. Go here for your copy: http://bit.ly/11U8Ea #
• First day back at work after a week of vacation. Man, this was a long day. #
• Just registered at Twellow, the Twitter yellow pages. Are you listed yet? http://twellow.com/u/barryreeves #
• What handy software tool would you like to have if someone were to write it for you? Let me know @barryreeves #
• Need to build a website? Here’s the solution. http://bit.ly/7n4Th #
• Getting ready for work. TGIF… #
• Quick tutorial on creating a MySQL database for your website. http://bit.ly/q0ecf #
• A beautiful day here in the Memphis area. Go to get out and enjoy it before it gets too hot. #

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• Vacation is finally here. Oh, what to do… #
• Latest Blog entries – http://www.barryreeves.com/ #
• Another beautiful day in Memphis, but this weekend looks like rain. #
• RT @barryreeves is giving away OptinPageGenerator. Go here for your copy: http://bit.ly/11U8Ea #
• Genealogy is my Favorite Past Time – http://www.barryreeves.com/genealogy/ #
• Auto Blog Builder Software – http://bit.ly/PDk0l #
• Help Desk Software – http://bit.ly/4flRB #
• Protect Your Online Assets – http://www.protectyouronlineassets.com/rep/abswebtech.html #

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A very interesting site a friend told me about.  It’s a collection of videos of people playing different musical instruments.  When you play the various videos at the same time, the people appear to be playing together.  Pretty cool.  Give it a look.

 http://www.inbflat.net/

I purchased my first domain name in 1997. It was for a personal genealogy site that I still own and run (http://www.reevesregistry.com). It was nearly a year before I bought another name. The next few were primarily for personal use although I used one for my computer consulting business.

About three or four years ago, I started buying domain names for investment purposes. I have tried to limit my purchases to .com names as they are still the most valuable of any of the top-level domains. I have a few .net and .org domains and one or two of the other top-levels, but unless it really has a catchy name or has a website already developed for it, I stick to the .com names.

Most of the domains I own were names I thought of myself and registered if I found them available. I have purchased perhaps a dozen domain names on Ebay that were originally registered by someone else. Currently I own about 150 domain names and believe that many of them are very good and potentially valuable names. I have never had any of my names appraised, but based on what I have seen other similar names sell for on Ebay (http://www.ebay.com) or Great Domains (http://www.greatdomains.com), I think most of them would bring a good price.

I have only sold five domain names since I started buying them. I got between $30 and $50 for four of them and the last one I sold (http://www.impulselogic.com) brought $750. Not bad for a $6.95 investment.

One of the most important things I did early on was to obtain an enom (http://www.enom.com) reseller account. This allowed me to purchase domains at $6.95 each per year. The account also provided a means of organizing my domains and keeping track of when they are about to expire. I also have a reseller account with GoDaddy (http://www.godaddy.com) and a few others, but my enom account is my primary reseller account and I eventually transfer domains I have at other registrars over to my enom account just before they are about to renew. I find that I can keep better track of them when they are all in one place.

Until next time,
Barry

• RT @barryreeves is giving away OptinPageGenerator. Go here for your copy: http://bit.ly/11U8Ea #
• Web Developer update: http://www.barryreeves.com/ #

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If you build websites like me, you’ve probably wondered many times what other people think about your sites.  Do they look good?   Do they provide valuable and interesting content?  Do they offer something that make people want to come back time after time?  Obviously, content is got to be THE most important aspect of your website.  If it doesn’t provide something of value to your visitors, then they’ll never come back.  Also, without good and unique content, it will be very difficult to achieve a good ranking with the search engines.  Let’s face it, without good rankings with at least one or two of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc., you’ll never get much traffic to your site.  Over the next few weeks, I’ll discuss several ways in which you can provide good content for your websites so that you can not only achieve good rankings with the search engines, but also to turn website visitors into repeat visitors.

Today, I’d like to tell you about a really handy tool that I discovered a while back that has been extremely useful to me when building a new website.  As you know, there are literally dozens of different web browsers available for people to use in surfing the net.  Of course Internet Explorer and Firefox are two of the most common, but there are many other lesser known browsers such as Opera, Chrome and Safari that have a faithful and growing following.

Every browser is a little different in how it renders a webpage and because of this, a particular website may appear visually different when using one browser as opposed to another.  Just because your website looks great in Firefox, doesn’t mean it will look okay when using Google Chrome.  If you’d like to see how how others see your website, then please try out this extremely useful website called Browsershots.org.

Browsershots.org

Browsershots allows you to enter the URL of any website (yours or someone elses) and get a screenshot of what the site looks like when using any of nearly 100 different browsers.  It may surprise you how your site may look through the eyes of another browser.  Check it out today.

• Keep smiling. It’s going to get better. #
• RT @barryreeves is giving away OptinPageGenerator. Go here for your copy: http://tinyurl.com/d6d55h #
• RT @barryreeves is giving away OptinPageGenerator. Go here for your copy: http://bit.ly/11U8Ea #
• One-of-a-Kind Antiques @ http://www.nostalgiccharm.com #
• RT @barryreeves is giving away OptinPageGenerator. Go here for your copy: http://bit.ly/11U8Ea #
• Telecommuting from home today. Many conference calls to attend. #
• Do you need to create a website? http://bit.ly/7n4Th #
• Anyone seen “Star Trek” yet? I may go next weekend. Is it as good as the previews suggest? #
• Happy Mother’s Day #

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It seems like all we heard about on the news for several weeks was the Swine Flu.  Even though the panic has appeared to have subsided a little, that doesn’t mean we should drop our guard.  Just a simple thing like washing your hands and covering your mouth when you sneeze can help minimize the spread of the Swine Flu (H1N1) virus.  If you or your children are unfortunate enough to get the flu, then by all means stay home from work or school.  Being around crowds of people is the worst thing you can do when something like the Flu is going around.

If you’re interested in keeping track of the latest news about the Swine Flu and how many cases have been reported in your State, then please visit the Center for Disease Control website.

As a website designer and owner of many sites, I’m always interested in knowing how others see my websites.  I’m not just talking about the physical look and feel of the site, but also in my visitors perception of the sites’ content value.  Anyone can throw together a website and publish it to the Internet in less than an hour if they have the proper tools.  But to make a really good impression, it takes a little effort.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll discuss some of the basic necessities you’ll need to build and maintain a website that is not only professional looking in appearance, but will also keep your website visitors coming back again and again.

Basic Tools

Website Builder/HTML Editor
There are literally thousands of choices with this one.  You can spend anywhere from $40 to over $1,000 for a website builder.  However, there are also quite a few of them for FREE if you know where to look.  Which one you choose depends on your skill level and knowledge of HTML as well as what type of websites you are planning to build.  If you’re just wanting to build a simple personal website for your family or to promote your own small business, then any of the FREE and low cost editors are fine.  But if you intend to build larger more complex sites with features like a shopping cart or a photo gallery, then you may want to consider something on the higher end of the scale.  If you intend on developing websites for other people and especially businesses, then you really should consider getting one of the tools used by professional web designers, such as Dreamweaver.  However, for this article, I’m really targeting the beginning web designer or someone with little or no HTML and Javascript experience.  So for those of you just starting out, here are a couple of website builders that I have personally used and would recommend.

My Free Website Builder

90 Second Website Builder

Either one of these tools will do an excellent job in creating a website you’ll be proud of.  One is free and the other is under $100 and well worth it if you want to add more of the bells and whistles to your sites without having to know what goes on under the covers.

More to Come…

• RT @barryreeves is giving away OptinPageGenerator. Go here for your copy: http://tinyurl.com/d6d55h #
• RT @barryreeves is giving away OptinPageGenerator. Go here for your copy: http://tinyurl.com/d6d55h #
• Be alert and stay informed. http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/ #
• FREE OptinPageGenerator – http://tinyurl.com/d6d55h #
• Something to think about. http://www.barryreeves.com/ #
• I’m giving away OptinPageGenerator. Check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/d6d55h #
• It’s been raining all day in Memphis. Hope to get outside tomorrow. #

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