Redesigning a Website

I thought I'd take a break from the website marketing and talk through the process I'm currently going through with my Holiday Cottages website. It's my own site, that's been running for almost 3 years, and I'm about to put in a totally new version of the site. It seems a shame not to share what I'm going through and record the frustrations and hopefully successes of the site.

But what is the site and why am I redesigning it?

Well, it started off around 3 years ago - just over a year after I set up my webdesign business. Things were quiet and I was looking for other avenues to supplement the income. It had never been my intention to completely run the business as webdesign - I don't like the eggs in one basket situation.

I'd fallen quickly into affiliate marketing - starting off with the Mortgage Rates website. Now there's another site in need of plenty of TLC! That started as a venture between me and a mortgage broker and I'd accidentally discovered affiliate selling and started trialling banners to supplement the income. 4 months later I discovered Adsense and tried that (very successfully) as well. At the time the site was getting a lot of money spent on it in Adwords, so the income was well received.

Then one day I discovered an affiliate scheme for holiday cottages and decided to give it a go. I was able to take a feed of all of their properties, create almost 4,000 pages of website using Perl and then FTP the site to my hosts.

But it takes ages to load that - every month!

After about 4 months the site had taken off, it was getting reasonable traffic (for a site that only needed me to initiate the monthly rebuild) and was earning £400 per month plus on commissions plus Adsense income.

So I built a second site, hoping that would be as successful, but it got about 15% of the traffic (it was written differently to cover different keywords). But still, the bookings went well for a few months.

Then the traffic dropped off, the original site became grey barred and I was too busy with customer's sites to do much else. Total income between the sites is around £200 per month, which is still a good return for the monthly effort (or lack of effort).

But was was wrong, what could I do and what have I tried? Read on...