Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

I’ve been writing more articles for Whole Earth Guide and it’s starting to pay off in terms of traffic coming onto the site.

Already, I’m sitting at number two when you search google.co.uk for “giants causeway pipe” for instance. Now, that might not sound like a terribly common search and you’d be right in thinking that, but on the other hand WEG doesn’t even have a pagerank yet so it’s darned impressive that it’s coming out at number two on anything at all.

I’m hoping to keep plugging away with around three or four articles per week over the Winter with the latest being our first draft of what will eventually become a major article on the Cathar castles.

Coming soon are the first of the regional guides for the site which I’ll be adding to as I work my way though the various articles planned for the site.

I’ve already added the first of the invited articles (on Hawaii) and hope to collect a whole lot more of those as the site grows. Why not be the author of the next one? All that I need are about 300-400 words plus a photo on a city or attraction somewhere amongst the countries presently supported for the site which can be added here; you will, of course, receive credit for the article.

One of the odd things that I’ve noticed since I’ve started doing the paid posts on a more serious basis is that there are quite a number of pretty much insignificant websites which are trying to promote themselves via paid posts.

Where on earth are they getting the money to do it? We’re not talking websites run by anyone famous, just those run by ordinary people like myself.

It costs an absolute minimum of $10 per post that they pay for yet some of the promotions have ran for a week or more over which time presumably dozens if not hundreds of blogs have taken them up on it. Now, I’ll grant that all of the personal promotions that I’ve seen have stuck to that minimum, but even so 10 blogs taking them up means $100.

Can it really be so profitable in terms of the additional traffic (and hence advertising revenue) that paid posts bring for even a personal blog to do such things?

Not that I’m complaining of course. After all, the $5 or so that I receive for writing 50 words for one of those may as well be in my pocket as someone elses. I am curious though as to the economic viability of the whole thing though and may well dip an experimental toe in the water to try it out for some of my listings sites at some point.

From this side of the Atlantic, America is largely seen as a hotel type holiday destination but, of course, the whole range of accommodation options are available. There is one difference though… the quality of accommodation is much higher than you’ll be used to.

Take for example the self-catering accommodation options (vacation rental in American). Las Vegas is one place where you’d definitely be thinking hotels but you can rent a quite spectacular penthouse apartment (condo in American) right in the centre.

More typically villa type places include Lake Tahoe where you can choose from a whole range of luxurious villas in a spectacular location and the more central Palm Springs area.

How much for all this? Well, a typical villa runs from around $1500 to $2000 per week (£750 to £1000) which is more expensive than the average in Europe but then what you’re getting for the money is a whole lot more than is generally available.

Thanks to dreadful flight times, I decided to stay a day in Manchester on the way back here.

Manchester aiport is a brilliant place for flight connections as all three terminals are within the one complex which includes access to the city via bus and train services too. The airport is so close to the city that you’ll often find it takes you longer to walk to the bus/train station than it does to get into the city itself. That closeness makes the price quite low too so it’s under a fiver for the return trip.

We were lucky enough to have timed our trip to coincide with the Manchester Pride events which, as you can see, include a very colourful parade through the streets. As usual with parades, the traffic before and afterwards is something of a nightmare but the small size of the city meant that we could easily walk back to the train station.

Also very pleasant is the free bus services which cover the Manchester city centre area.

We’ve just added Manchester to our Whole Earth Guide where you’ll find more information on the attractions of the city.

One of the long term aims I have is to be able to sell photos from our little collection of sites as we tend to build up quite a collection of photos in the course of developing the likes of our Pyrenees Guide and, on a grander scale, our Whole Earth Guide.

For the guides themselves, the little Nikon Coolpix 3700 was more than enough. Whilst 3mp mightn’t sound much these days, you don’t need anything like that for the internet and in fact even the largest images on the websites is under 1mp. Even those 300,000 pixel cheapo cameras have much more resolution than is required for internet use.

However, it’s quite a different matter when you want to sell the photos as prints or whatever.

So, we had a bit of an upgrade last year to the 6mp Nikon S10 which is an excellent little camera and one of the few which offer x10 zoom on a compact digital camera. It’s certainly improved the photos that we’ve taken since getting it quite substantially, it’s still limiting us in terms of potential future sales of the images we take.

Anyway, ’twas time to really up the ante and so as of next week we’ll be starting to use our brand new Nikon D40x which takes us up to 10mp and will give us a whole lot more flexibility. In fact, the resolution increase is much more than it seems as there are all kinds of settings on the camera should let us produce prints up to poster size.

Now “all” we need to do is to wait for the perfect lighting for the photos…. the weather at the moment is more like the depths of Winter than mid-Summer!