With nearly a decade in the mobile industry, helping people to find their dream handset my brother decided to create a website that brings all the mobile phone reviews and information you need into one place without the confusing jargon that often surrounds the subject.

I wanted to share my knowledge to create a site that helped those that didn’t fully understand mobile phones but also that allowed those that were savvy with mobile phones to find the best possible deal.”

YourPhoneReviews.com not only allows you to get advice on your next mobile purchase but also lets you search nearly a million contract and pay as you go tariffs, ensuring you get the best deal. Now working outside of the major mobile phone chains he wanted to focus on giving honest, impartial opinions of handsets as well as allowing others to pass on their experiences.

“I knew from the start that I wanted to have a site that was easy to navigate and allowed the users to view reviews written by other users simply be selecting the phone they wanted.”

YourPhoneReviews.com are running a competiton to win a £50 iTunes voucher! All you need to do is share your opinion of a phone you have owned or used to own in the past. As nearly everyone has a mobile phone it is a competition that all can take part in!

It’s easy to add your review simply follow this link and follow the instructions for your chance to win a £50 iTunes voucher!

So having had the gauntlet thrown down, I had a duck and dive around t’internet to see what the competition looked like. What I found out is that despite being there being lots of retail websites in the model railways arena, none of them do it really well. So having learnt a long time ago, that nothings ever been ‘done’ on the web, I started writing a design brief for Michelle at Caboodle Design to get stuck into. One year almost to the day of starting out I am pleased to say that modelrailways.co.uk is now live. Ok, I have low stock levels at the moment, but that’s being worked on by my intelligent and underpaid university student brother

Part of my own brief was to try and offer something no other retailer in the industry is doing. A few other websites have model railway blogs’ but use them for product information and such like. I want to offer something a bit more interesting that will keep people coming back and interacting with the bloggers. I have managed to convince a couple of ‘experts’ to write for me for free. Bill is an ex railwayman and driver and Brian is also an ex railwayman who looked after the signals and telecom network used by the railway. I have had some nifty caricatures drawn of them both – the likeness is quite remarkable.

Bill Moore, will be writing about his experiences of working on British Railways from the end of the steam era up until recently when he retired as a Driver Standards Manager. Brian Lambert, who is also an author of some excellent books relating to the hobby, will be taking questions and writing about the more confusing side of model railway electronics.

Last thing on my list of website USP’s was a model railways forum. I was actually in two minds whether to bother with this as a user forum on a retail site might not gain the trust of its users. With this in mind I have added a tiny sub-forum that deals with shops issues. I do not intend to ‘sell’ to these users. Hopefully the community I can grow here will help to indirectly drive sales in the future. As I was running the domain with a forum on previously, I have copied over the existing community and its content to the new website.

Being the first retail website I have ever been involved with that actually sells ‘stuff’, I have had the joy of stock to deal with, however I am actually really looking forward to it – I have a bit of an OCD for organising and sorting things, this will allow me to keep a nice, tidy inventory in a nice neat stock cupboard – sigh Another hurdle of ‘being new’ is trying to get the banks to give you a secure payment gateway. I tried for 6 months but gave up in favour of using PayPal until I have some trading history I can go and wave under a banks nose – gits.

The long term plan is drive the business online using SEO and of course affiliate marketing, unfortunately though the model industry has adopted a policy of only working with ‘model shops’ that have retail premises, thus making most of the main manufacturers unobtainable. If this does not change, a small retail premises maybe on the cards to unable me to gain access to those other accounts.

I’ll report back after christmas and report on my progress to model retailer mogul Right, back to loading products on!

With the kids off nursery on Monday morning I decided to have look and see what was about to buy, so that I had something for ‘next time’ it snowed. Bearing in mind that the press were reporting that 65% of the UK’s work force had taken the day off I didn’t think I would see anything I ordered until at least late this week or early next.

Quick search on the big ‘G’ bought me to Tobaggans.co.uk. The site boosts selling high quality laminated Beechwood wooden tobaggans loving handmade by Bavarian coach builders. These looked like the ticket and at £85 I was thought it was fairly reasonable. So I bought one! woo.

This morning, 23 hours after I placed my order citylink rang the door bell with my new toy! Brilliant service, despite the snow it arrived 3 days earlier than stated on their website. So hats off to these guys and see you on the slopes!

Given the choice, I personally would go for Turkey, only because Egypt’s flight program is a bit lighter since XL Airways went bust. There are other airlines stepping in to the fil the gap, however I am sure that many are waiting to see how the travel industry fairs in the traditional January early booking period.

If you havent’ already, don’t forget to check out sunshine’s awesome affiliate area.

Why do some forums over-moderate themselves? What I mean is why do some have such strict posting rules and guidelines that it makes them a wanky place to hang out? I know that we as website owners have to be careful here in the UK as laws are such, that if something liable or defamatory is posted we are held personally responsible. I’ll give you an example of what I mean…

A forum exists for sports fans. The fans like to go on and talk about the competitors and the teams and anything else related to the sport. Ok, you may think, that makes sense. So at the moment, the users are talking about rumours they have heard, who they would like to see playing next season and generally speculating about whats going to happen in 2009. However, the moderators have decided that this is not acceptable and go around deleting threads and banning members for anything that isn’t 100% fact. I mean, come on, that’s the point of being a fan of any sport isn’t it? Discussing what can happen, might happen and will happen. I bet there are people who will read this who belong to fan forums of football teams. Do you get a ban or reprimand if you suggest that a particular player MAYBE signing for the team? Am I missing something here? As long as the comments posted don’t break any laws I can’t see the problem? This isn’t just limited to sports forums, all message boards seem to have similar problems.

On the flipside my wife frequents a forum for mothers which, has a complete LACK of moderation. Users are sometimes literally bullied online in threads by other users who obviously nothing better to do with their time. Reporting any such behaviour seems to just get ignored.  Just the other week my wife took offence to an new members username. I can’t remember the exact name but it was somethiing along the lines of ‘Hornyasf*ck’. The copy and paste response that came back some 26 hours later basically said they couldnt see the problem and that the name would stay.

On forums I have run and been moderator of in the past I have always welcomed new members and even pointed them in the right direction if they can’t find something they are looking for, not abusing them for not using the search then banning them after one post for asking the same question someone else did 6 months ago.

Also why I am ranting like a girl, why do people get pissed off with ‘Necro Posting’? If a thread still has relevant information in it why are people not allowed to comment on it… ?

Someone calm me down please!

So we all know the score, you’ve slaved for hours coding and building and adding content to a new website. The next thing you want to do is try and get some reciprocal links, or link love as we prefer to call it.

My new niche website about ‘widget reviews’, and by a stroke of luck and careful negotiation, I manage to bag myself ‘widgets.com’. So armed with a cup of well made tea I started scouring the web for potential suitors to exchange some love with. Pretty quickly I come across a store selling widgets with a domain ‘widgetsdirect.com’. Hmm, no PR, few thousand pages in google, well structured site and its bang on the money as far as being of the same subject as my site.

“I’ll email them” I thought and see if they want to ‘get involved’. Writing emails for link exchanges isn’t the easiest thing these days, you have to try and make your email stand out from the rest of the link exchange spam they probably get. So after a carefully thought out email which contained two contact numbers for me and an outline of why I want a link, I waited. I waited 7 minutes before the guy was on the phone. This one was keen – just how I like them.

I wanted to get some decent links without causing them too much work as too put them off doing it. So I asked (maybe wrongly) just for a footer link site-wide with the anchor text ‘widgets’. In exchange I offered them hand edited deeplinks from all of my product pages to theirs, and a banner ad chucked in for good measure. After a few question regarding my ‘intentions’ with my site they agreed.

“Wahoo”, I thought. That’s a lot of links too me from a relevant site. My master plan involved renegotiation at a later date. i.e. get some deeplinks back off them, as I was confident that the way I was planning to implement their links, would not only give them some nice ‘link love’ but should generate them some sales.

After a couple of weeks of messing about with code I had implemented my partners deeplinks and also built them an admin area – to their specification’s, to allow them to login and update their own links. Just 24 hours after our first conversation my links had been added to their website too. Time to sit back and wait.

I immediately noticed that the footer link had been omitted from the homepage, a quick phone call and that was sorted. However the other party seemed a bit cagey about it at the time I just thought that they were embarrassed I had noticed a bunch of dead links in their footer.

Here we are 8 weeks into our relationship, things are going well, my ‘other half’ regularly updates and adds new deeplinks. Ahh almost maritial bliss – I am thinking should I propose…

One evening I got messing about with Google Webmaster Tools, I’ll admit I haven’t even looked at this for about a year and I am really impressed by how many new features have been added. So I add my widget site and start to scour the data it already has stored. I have a look through the ‘Pages with External Links’ report, lots of links in there of personal sites that I have added links to myself, couple of forums etc but no ‘widgetsdirect.com’. Now that’s strange, maybe G hasn’t found my link in the other site yet. I’ll wait a few more days.

I left it over a week, no sign of anything from my lover but lots more new links G has found else where, even some posted on forums 48h hours ago. Something fishy is going on!

First thing I did was view the source of the page where my link is. Looks fine, robots set to follow just looks like a normal link. Gave it a click and it opened up my site. hmmm. So the link is there but it’s not being followed, and there aren’t any no follow tags anywhere to be found.

A few more days passed, I didn’t want to ask my partner as I didn’t want to seem paranoid and insecure. So I got chatting to my brother and he ran the ‘widgetsdirect.com’ url through a web program that crawls a page like a bot a shows you ‘what a search engine bot see’s’. And this is what it saw:

http://www.widgetsdirect.com/http://www.widgets.com/

So accordingly to that little test any bots would ignore the link as it would show as a 404. Bollocks – I didn’t use this exact word but you get the idea. How? Why? I had so many questions I was confused and hurt.

Having decided I was getting code blindness looking at the same strip of code in the page source code I called on a new set of eyes, namely Happy’s. It took him a few scans but Happy spotted it…

When my link was added, my now very ex partner had omitted the ” ” from the code. i.e. it should have been

a href=”http://www.widgets.com/”

but instead

a href=http://www.widgets.com/

Bizarly I had never checked the link in anything but internet explorer, which detected the error, corrected it, firefox showed the 404. Doh!

So I am a bit pissed at this point as I have put a lot effort into our relationship and the whole thing had been a lie! After I had calmed down a bit I gave them the benefit of the doubt and emailed requesting the error be corrected and why it needed correcting. 24 hours later, no reply. One week later and still no reply. Bugger.

At the time I thought maybe they had made a genuine mistake, however just looking at how clean and organised the code is I can only assume this was done intentionally.

Despite feeling very used and very gullable, I am going to get back out there, plenty more fish in the sea and all that. Grrr.