I’m sure a lot of you who read this blog have your own personal horror stories about web hosting companies. I’ve dealt with so many different web hosting providers over the years that I could probably sit down and write a dozen reviews of their services and pros and cons for you.

Luckily, thanks to Web Hosting Geeks, I don’t have to take the time to do that. This site is overflowing with unbiased web hosting reviews for all sorts of different providers. Anyone looking to switch hosts or just get started in the web development game might want to check the site out.

The most convenient part of their site, in my eyes, is the break down of hosts by theme or category. They’ve taken all of the hosts in their system and selected the best for such things as: blogs, forums, ecommerce, etc. There is also a breakdown for Unix and Windows hosting.

Web Hosting Geeks provides more than reviews though. They also have an entire section of their site dedicated to web hosting articles. This is a great resource for anyone struggling with picking a host, managing their current host or those just interested in how web hosting really works. In addition to host related topics, there are articles that cover standard web development subjects such as traffic, SEO and domain names.

Picking the right web host is sometimes a hit or miss proposition especially if you’re just starting out. It’s important that you take the time to do proper research before picking a web host. Remember that going with the cheapest option isn’t always the best idea and that many people have probably gone before you and have advice to give. That’s what makes a site like Web Hosting Geeks is so valuable. You can use it to learn from others’ mistakes and make the right choice for yourself.

I mentioned in my last post about eBay that I had a framework in place for quickly launching these types of affiliate sites. Today I’ve launched another one: Discount Sports Items

This site is actually built as a companion piece to all of the sports news sites that make up the Jack’s Sports Report network. Each one of the sports reports has team-based pages that previously contained a few links to related eBay auctions. Now with the Discount Sports Items I can cross-link the sites and offer visitors a wider variety of auctions to choose from almost seamlessly.

There wasn’t much effort involved in this new site since it runs on the same set of code that made Golfing Galaxy so quick and simple to setup. One of my big ideals whenever I do something is to build it in a manner that makes it easy to roll out similar sites quickly and efficiently if the idea behind the site proves to be successful. I’d already had a few conversions on the golf site and eBay listings on the sports report sites is proven to work so I’m optimistic for Discount Sports Items.

When I first started getting involved in freelance web development the requests for building online stores were few and far between. In recent years this has totally changed, as people want more and more to begin selling their products and services online. This trend has increased just as quickly as people’s concerns and interests in Search Engine Optimisation.

I’ve used my fair share of Ecommerce Software in this time and, really, they’re all about the same. They come in two flavors: hosted and self-hosted. My preference is to always go with the hosted solution because while the costs are usually higher the headaches are few and far between. A lot of the hosted solutions also have really excellent hooks that let you tie into your own CMS or scripts.

The one big knock on hosted shopping cart packages is that you lose almost all control over the look and feel of the interface. This is unfortunate because the best Web Design firms out there didn’t exactly build most of these carts. This is where the hooks they provide or so important. With the right hooks and programming you can do as much as you can on your side of the equation to offset what’s lacking on the hosted side.

I do a lot of my freelance work in an industry where time is usually of the essence. This makes for incredibly tight deadlines but also creates a lot of leeway on issues of billing. If you want something don’t quickly, but correctly, sometimes you just need to pay for it. When a client and I are working against the clock on a site it’s not uncommon for us to outsource the work of converting a design into markup for us.

That’s where services like the ones provided by Choppr come into play. They offer table-less html/css development at a very reasonable rate. For only $200, they will take your design in the form of any standard image file and in three days convert it into standards compliant, hand coded HTML & CSS markup with optimized images and cross-browser compatibility. The quality of their code (which is incredibly important to someone like me who needs to wrap PHP around it) can be seen on their site.

A nice part of the service Choppr provides is their willingness to convert a psd/png/ai layout to html. That gives your on-staff designer a lot of options and the opportunity to work in their graphic design program of choice. This again lends a helping end to web developers on strict timelines.

The idea of outsourcing markup work like this might be something new to a lot of you. I think it’s something you should strongly consider especially if converting layouts into markup is just not something you enjoy. It’s also a fantastic option for those of us who might be incredibly strong at programming but fail a bit when it comes to design. You could save a huge amount of time and stress by even outsourcing the design first and then hiring Choppr to take that layout and convert it for you.

As my freelance career has progressed I’ve had some experience with outsourcing these kinds of projects. A lot of layout converting companies promise you the world for pennies and end up delivering terrible markup that doesn’t run in a variety of browsers and ends up costing you more time and money to fix than you would’ve spent just doing it yourself.

If you’re looking for a quality group to code up a layout for you check out Choppr. They believe in web standards and clean code for a fair price and that’s pretty rare these days.

I’m always on the look out for decent golf sites to buy. At the start of this year I went on a massive hunt to find some good quality golf sites to add to my network and came away with absolutely nothing. I eventually broke down and started several from scratch and within the last few weeks that strategy is finally starting to pay off.

Even though I gave up in January, I’ve still had my eyes open for any interesting golfing sites on the various auction forums since then. Finally, earlier this week, the waiting paid off.

The Key Is The Content

A golf blog at golfing-galaxy.com came up for sale at Digital Point. The site was running on WordPress and had 13 posts with unique content that added up to about 8,000 words. I ended up paying $65 for the site which averaged out to be just under one cent a word.

I already have a golf blog that’s doing quite well so the idea of starting another one wasn’t really that appealing to me. I decided that this would be a great opportunity to really get my hands dirty with the new eBay affiliate program.

phpBay Pro To The Rescue

My post on phpBay Pro as an alternative to BANS is probably one of the most popular on this blog. I thought buying and expanding Golfing Galaxy would be a great opportunity to really see what I could do with phpBay Pro and a really lightweight template/framework I’ve been developing for eBay affiliate sites.

You can see by visiting Golfing Galaxy what my template and framework does. The template is actually an open source one I discovered a commentator using on my original phpbayPro post. I took that template and built a site that is entirely powered by a simple menu file and some .htaccess tricks. Adding new manufacturers to the site is as trivial as adding one line of code.

Now The Fun Begins

With the site now updated and expanded it’s time to start building backlinks and getting some traffic. Hopefully this is where my current network of golf sites I’ve built from the ground up can really come into play. I’ll keep everyone posted in the future as to how things are going.