Storebuilder Blog - Site Building

Been quiet for the last month or so whilst I developed a new scratchcard site. Online Scratchcards are going to be a big future market and with gambling affiliate rules applying - i.e. lifetime customers, repeat revenue etc this is a good new market to get into.

Even more tempting is the mobile gaming market, but as that involves developing for mobile handsets and WAP I'm leaving that for a future project when I have more manpower to put towards it.

Whilst I was researching this market I came across http://www.probability.co.uk which is a recent start up in this market and looks set for a good push. Definitely an investment opportunity and well worth a look at. The affiliate program goes live in June and they'll let me know when it's up and running. If you want to start developing for the mobile gaming market now is the time.

Instant games is another area with very good potential however you'll need good link building skills to make these types of site work as there is minimal creative writing that you can do to promote this product. There is only so much you can write about "deal or no deal?" unless you are a massive fan I guess!

That's why choosing a CMS like joomla to develop in will give you a headstart because it allows you to publish news items frequently and it looks so much better than wordpress.

This month Joomla updated to 1.5.17, so you need to get your sites updated if you haven't already. There was a problem with 1.5.16 which crashed two sites when I first updated and so I did a rollback to 1.5.15 and hit the forums to find out what the problem was.

Something to do with the way they declared variables and it wasn't having it with PHP4 so they rushed out the 1.5.17 version and that works a treat.

Joomla pack has been updated and taken over by a new developer who have made some improvements and this is THE tool to use for backup, restore and cloning joomla sites. Find it here. It's now called Akeeba Backup and they still have a free version.

This months Rocket Theme template looks interesting but rather than start developing any new sites I'm going to begin integrating some social network tools with the Storebuilder site to make it easy for webmasters to socialise and do that all important link building stuff. The boring stuff that just has to be done.

For that to happen I'm looking at what joomla can do with facebook and considering using that as the primary method of gaining links. I'm sick to death of getting lame link exchange requests and so it's high time I searched out some quality sites to exchange with. If that's you - contact me here.

| More...