Email Simon Gould

This is a network of websites designed, built, created and run by me (Simon Gould). As of May 2007 I am a 31 year old call center worker based in the suburbs of London. I started creating websites in July of 2005 and over the years has albeit very slowly built a few more. All of the websites are made using HTML and are hand coded. CSS has sometimes come into play I've never really felt much creative benefit over using HTML and until HTML somehow ceases to be viable as a way of creating respectable looking websites I see no reason to stop. Here is my network of sites and some information about them:

This was my very first site and went online in July 2005. The design, feel and aim was to make it a fitness portal. This would be a very ambitious project for even a company with many employees but a full time worker whose just learnt HTML is suicide! Anyway the design is influenced by the health section of the BBC website (both a purple theme). I like the use of columns in general and tried it here. However the overall design with different colors for different aspects of fitness was design overkill rather like the idea for a fitness portal but you have to start somewhere! The site was going to be and was for a while updated weekly but this fizzled out in time. Monetization was a primary reason for creation and Google adsense and commission junction (affiliate marketing) was the choice. The CTR has always been very high due to well blended ad units but with pageviews only ever reaching a 10k max the money made was never going to be big.

This was my 4th site and went online in December of 2006. All my life I've had a talk radio station on in the background in whatever I do even when going to sleep. This radio station is LBC Radio. LBC radio was London's first local independent commercial radio station in 1973 and has been on air ever since. I have been listening to for years and love it. I thought it would be nice to make a tribute or fan site and give a bit of information about the presenters and the times they appear for new listeners. What's handy about this is presenters only ever change about every 4-6 months max so the site would need little updating and would always be current. The design itself is a very simplistic one due to talk radio being a very simplistic format. One thing to note is the LBC logo (copy of the corporate logo) is completely recreated in HTML using tables and background colors, it isn't an image file. I'd been reading alot about website usability from Jakob Neilson and his useit.com site so I applied some of his findings here. Every paragraph I write on the site is quite long so I bolded 1 or 2 key words to help describe what the whole paragraph was about. What I also like on the site is that each page has it's own recommended resources section to give the reader more information on the web about what they are reading. The history page has got a link from Wikipedia which is quite nice but no longer counts in rankings (I think they still have an influence).

As of writing this is the latest website and went online in May 2007. After reading an ebook by Jeremy Palmer and a blog by a fellow UK called Kieron Donoghue, both millionaires thanks to the net. I thought I would try my hand at affiliate marketing. The result is this price comparison site for home gyms. The subject is because I workout regularly so I know the terms and references used and can easily describe the benefits and features gyms have to offer and how they can be applied to a fitness routine. I signed up with various sites that offer similar products so I could put all the prices up by way of comparison and to encourage people to buy through my link. BTW the stores I found and have a relationship really were the cheapest I found especially one. The design of the site is influenced by pricegrabber.com and shopping.com in the words I've used and to display products prominently. What I'm not sure about is the theme and the blue and black, it just looks like a bathroom superstore kind of site. But still, only time will tell if it is a success. What I must mention is that all fitness equipment sites have the same 2-3 paragraphs about each product which is the same at every site you go to. However I have ensured that all content is unique and serves as a review of the home gym on offer. So the site is a kind of review and price comparison site in one (must be a winner!). I will be heavily promoting the site with PPC however the volumes are quite low so it's difficult to tell if something is working. Anyway I've used SEO as well just in case.

OK so this is the next foray into affiliate marketing and went online at the end of May 2007. This is comparison and review type site for the diet food delivery services market. What i did was form relationships with nearly all of the diet food delivery services and did a review of each of them and gave them a rating at the end with a more info box above the rating with the affiliate link. The idea for the site was that I noticed a really profitable merchant in commission junction affiliate network that I'm a member of, we're talking £100.00 ($200.00) per thousand clicks is really high? This was for Medifast so I found out what it was and what they do which is diet food deliveries. After I read about the service I thought they were a really good idea for people who want to lose weight. What happens is you have every meal you eat during the day including snacks is prepared and delivered to you on a weekly basis. You then, like taking a pill just reheat and eat what is prescribed or prepared for you for that day. The meals are designed to be healthy and nutritious and tasty yet you end up losing weight. For people who can never keep track of what they eat this would be ideal. For the site I thought a green theme would work for food (natural color) and I liked it when I used it for the dieting section of my first site. I was lucky enough to find a green chef logo from an online logo shop which matched perfectly. So far impressions are very low for PPC with specific keywords related to the product so I'm going to target broader terms and go from there.

Although not coming very frequently at all this is my next affiliate site. It is on a regular theme now which is fitness and fitness equipment. It went online at the beginning of January 2008 to catch the fitness rush at the beginning of every new year. I've stolen the template I used for newhomegym.com because I'm not very original and because it was simple and it worked quite well I feel. The problem with this elliptical site is that with the beginning of the new year there are some trainers that I've advertised and written reviews on have now become obsolete. What I'll have to do is just not market these particular ellipticals. I will still keep them on the site though as the site is quite small and I think the more pages the better for the search engine algorithms. As always I shall be marketing this site with PPC advertising and impressions are low but I will see if I can make any money with this one, only time will tell. One thing I must mention is that I've used abit of shopping psychology with the colors I've used on this site. I'll explain, the theme is 3 colors. The black is the content, the blue is for all links hence the .net is blue in the logo. And the main part is the "sale" color in the logo is orange. Whenever you hover over a link it turns the same orange. I'm hoping that in the shoppers mind they equate the word with the color they're looking at when they hover over a link tempting to click through. They see the word "sale" in their mind, "sale" meaning that there is somehow money off or that they're getting a good deal. This way they'll be more inclined to click through and when they're there, more inclined to buy. That's the theory anyway. As said only time will tell if it works but it's something I'll start using more frequently I think.

Now for some personal links to websites I use that have helped me along the way or that I have enjoyed and want to give some free link love.