TSOHost are fantastic

Well I’ve now been with TSOHost for just over 3 months and in this time I’ve moved all 11 of my sites over to their service. I’ve simply been amazed by the performance, reliability and support that they offer.

So far I’ve not experienced a single problem with the hosting reliability and all of my sites work faster on their servers. Besides the great performance and superb reliability, the support service is amazing, I’ve mainly used the web based ticketing system, which I’ve used at various times of day, and always recieved excellent response times from extremely knowledgable staff, they really know their stuff.

The other thing I find great is the fact that I can host a mixture of Windows and Linux sites all within the same account. Most of my sites are ASP.NET websites so I’ve always used Windows hosting, but hosting WordPress sites on Windows servers isn’t great.  With TSOHost I’ve taken advantage of the Windows and Linux hosting and tranferred my Windows based WordPress sites onto the Linux platform.  WordPress installation is also a breeze via their control panel.

If anyone is looking for a cheap, reliable, fast hosting solution with superb support, I’d definately recommend TSOHost.

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Oak Cupboard – Sept 2010 Update

I have decided to continue building up the product range, with an aim to try to have 100 oak cupboards on the site by the end of the year!

I’ve started by adding more products to the popular Brooklyn Oak Range and the value for money Lincoln Oak Range.

I’ve also decided to split the Oak Sideboard category into two (as it was getting quite a long page), so the site now has Oak Sideboard and Large Oak Sideboard categories.

I’ve now reached 70 products on the oak cupboard site.

Besides adding products I’ve made a few tweaks to the design of the site, the main changes are making the left hand navigational menu font slightly larger, and making the vouchers more prominent on the product listing pages.

The number of visitors to my site has increased slighly and is now averaging around 70 per day, however sales have been very slow this month.

August 2010 – Moved Web Hosting

I’ve had my site hosted with WebHosting.uk.com since launch, and been very happy with the price, performance and support.  However over recent months the reliability of the hosting has caused my site to be down on quite a few occassions, which is obviously not good for business.  Although support always sort the problem very quickly (once I report the problem), I decided it was time to look around for an alternative host.

I first tried WebHost.uk.net but after spending over 2 weeks trying to get my asp.net based site working on their server, and continually being fobbed off by their support staff, I decided to ask for my money back (which I recieved back without any problem).

I then came across TSOHost.co.uk, and have been soo impressed! What a fantastic service they offer.  I had my sites up and running on there server in no time.  Had a few questions that support responded to within 5 minutes. The first major thing I noticed was that all of my sites run so much faster on this hosting providers servers (something to do with Grid Hosting I think).  Also, I’ve not had a single site go down since moving to this hosting provider, and I’ve now moved all of my sites to this provider as I’ve been so impressed. Besides excellent service, support, performance and reliability, the way you manage your sites is so easy using their custom built interface.

I simply cannot explain how pleased I have been with TSOHost.co.uk, I started with the ‘Lite’ package at £14.99, I’ve now upgraded to the ‘Standard’ package at £34.99 (per year).  I also needed to host more domains so added a 5 domain pack for a further £25.00 (per year).  So I’m now paying 59.99 per year for the hosting of 9 websites, which seems pretty good to me considering how responsive and reliable the sites are.  I no longer need to even consider moving to dedicated hosting.

Oak Cupboard – July / August 2010 Update

Had a bit of a lull on the development Oak Cupboard site throughout July and August, just kept things ticking along with regular voucher code updates, and a few additional products, but other than that sat back a little to see how it got along.

Also did some more promotional activities in an attempt to increase traffic levels, this seems to be having a positive effect as my average number of visitors have increased from around 40 per day to around 60 per day.

After the poor number of sales in June, I wasn’t expecting much more in July and August, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised with July being my best month to date and August not far behind.

Oak Cupboard – June 2010 Update

Decided to add a new category of oak cupboards that focus on Glazed Oak Dressers, I’ll be building on this category in coming months, but for the time being I’ve added 6 products to this category.  Take a look at: Glazed Glazed Oak Dressers

Also started looking for some other kinds of oak cupboards that I could include, and came across this beautiful Oak hidden office unit.

The number of visitors to my site has remained fairly constant throughout June (averaging around 40 visitors per day), however from a Sales point of view it’s been really quiet this month, with only 3 sales, I guessing it’s the time of year, everyones out enjoying the sun and not buying furniture.

Oak Cupboard – May 2010 developments and sales

This month I’ve added Oak Cupboards from Vancouver Petite Oak range.  I also managed to obtain an exclusive 5% discount code for this range that should be valid for the whole month of May (maybe a little longer). This range of cupboards can be seen on our Vancouver Petite Oak page.

The Vancouver range also includes these amazing Oak Cupboards / Sideboards with built in Plasma TV Lift mechanisms, I particularly like the Vancouver Oak Sideboard with TV Lift.

Updated the site with quite a lot of voucher codes from OakFurnitureSolutions that are running for the month of May.

Oak Cupboard – April 2010 website developments and statistics

Vistors to the Oak Cupboard site are now becoming quite regular and averaging at 40 per day, this months sales were not quite as good as March, but still quite regular and averaging a couple of sales per week. I was expecting the Easter break to bring in a few extra sales, but it didn’t appear to do so.

Unfortunately I had some hiccups with my server which caused my site to be down for a few hours over the Easter weekend.  The problem was apparently something to do a Shared Application pool that kept crashing, so they kindly put me onto a dedicated application pool which seemed to cure the problem.  Maybe one day I’ll be able to afford my own dedicated server, but until then Shared hosting will just have to do.  At least the support service from Web hosting UK is superb, especially the live chat, when considering I’m only paying £26.99 per year it is excellent value for money.

I continued adding more Oak cupboards including some beautiful 2 & 3 door sideboards from the Andorra Range of furniture, these can be seen on our Andorra Range page.

I also managed to obtain an exclusive voucher code for my site for the Mobel Oak Furniture range, this should last for at least the month of April (maybe longer if I’m lucky).  This is a great range that includes one of our best sellers, Mobel Oak DVD cupboard, and with 5% off it’s definately the best time to buy.

Finally I added the Vancouver Oak product range to my site, this is one of my retailers most popular ranges (apparently), so I am hoping this range may bring in a few more sales for my site. Fingers crossed.

Oak Cupboard – March 2010 – Best month so far…

March was the best month  to-date for the Oak Cupboard site with over 10 sales which came in quite regularly throughout the month,  I must say after the quiet first couple of months in 2010 I was quite surprised to do so well this month but very pleased. Fingers crossed it will continue like this.

I also introduced Oak Cupboards from the modern ‘Fusion’ range of oak furniture to the site, which is a range of furniture I personally really like. Although it’s rather expensive, I think it looks fantastic.

Oak Cupboard – Feb 2010 – First Sales in 2010

Feb was quite a strange month for the Oak Cupboard site, the number of visitors remained quite constant averaging at around 40 visitors per day, the start of the month continued as January ended with no sign of any sales, I was begining to think there was something fundamentally wrong with the site, and then a few sales came in quite close succession during the middle of the month which was very pleasing, but then they  dried up again and the month ended quietly.

I continued building up the product range steadily adding a few more products.  Also continued with link building work.

The site now seems quite firmly positioned at no 1 on google for the search term ‘oak cupboard’, although there is still plenty more work required on getting other search terms ranked well.

Oak Cupboard Website developments in Jan 2010

During January I was working on a new development for the Oak Cupboard site, which is a cupboard finder, I put this live a couple of weeks ago and it seems to be working well.  It allows selection from a variety of options and then lists all of the cupboards that match the selections.  This took me quite some time having never developed anything like this and it was quite tricky but I’m quite pleased with the overall result, I just hope some users find it useful.  This feature can be seen across the top of www.oakcupboard.co.uk

I am planning to use the source code from this oak cupboard site for my next venture, although not sure what yet, so these sort of enhancement will almost certainly benefit any future sites I develop.

I also continued adding a few more products, now up to 38 products, I’ve not added any further ranges just added to the existing ranges.

I’ve slowed down on the link building, think I may need to start working on this again as I’ve noticed my site has started to slip on Google for some of my targeted keywords.

I’ve also just introduced a new category for cupboards that make the perfect TV Cabinet / TV Stand or Hifi Storage Solution, I already had quite a few cupboards that fit this category so it made it quite easy to add.

Oak Cupboard Website – More Cupboards

Recently I’ve been sourcing more oak cupboards.  I’ve added a couple of new cupboards to the Alto Range, Brooklyn Range and Mobel Range, I’ve also added a new Eden Range of Cupboards.  I’ve now got a total of 30 cupboards on the site. Still got plenty more too add, but it’s so time consuming writing unique descriptions for each product, which is something I opt to do to try to ensure my content remains quite unique.

Besides increasing the number of products, I’ve also been working on improving the Range pages, adding more textual content, range images and links to the retailer range pages. I’ve improved around 5 of these pages so far, just another 8 to go.

Also just added a ‘Recently Added Oak Cupboards’ section to the home page, this is just to help google index my new product pages that bit quicker (hopefully).

I’ve also continued with obtaining more back links, Yahoo now tells me I have 40 inbound links, Google thinks 14 (but google is always way behind with its statistical information).  I’ve also noticed my site is at position 1 for my main search terms on Yahoo, and I’ve started to see a bit of traffic coming from this search engine.  I’ve been trying to get my site listed on Bing, but no luck, not sure what you have to do to get listed on this search engine, although I don’t expect much traffic from it (does anyone actually use Bing rather than Google for searching?)

Oak Cupboard Website – Back Links

Over the last few weeks been working on building up a steady number of back links.

I’ve been aiming to get around 10-15 backlinks per week, which I think I am just about managing.

I don’t find it easy getting back links, but the hard work will hopefully pay dividends and improve my google ranking.

Maybe it’s already working, as I’ve noticed my site ranking has improved on Google, for my primary terms ‘oak cupboard’ and ‘oak cupboards’ my site is now at position 3

Oak Cupboard Website – Retailer pages

I’ve now added some ‘Retailer’ pages to the Oak Cupboard web site, so far I’ve created 3 retailer pages for Oak Furniture Solutions, Oak Furniture Land and Pine Solutions.

These pages provide information on these fantastic retailers together and focus on the Oak Cupboards they sell, the pages can be seen here:

http://www.oakcupboard.co.uk/oak-furniture/oak-furniture-solutions.aspx

http://www.oakcupboard.co.uk/oak-furniture/oak-furniture-land.aspx

http://www.oakcupboard.co.uk/oak-furniture/pine-solutions.aspx

Oak Cupboard Website – Voucher / Discount Codes

Over the last few days I’ve been working on implementing voucher / discount functionality.

I am pleased to annouce that this work has now been put onto the live site, so the Oak Cupboard website now displays all of the currently available voucher codes from all of the Retailers whose products are included on the site.

I’ve tried tried not too affect the aesthetics of the site to much by adding in this functionality, whilst I’ve also tried to ensure the relevant voucher codes are always displayed at the right time.  Therefore, the home page displays all voucher codes, the product listing pages only display the voucher codes linked to the retailers of the products being listed, the product details page only displays the vouchers relevant to the products retailer.

I also had a delima, to use icodes or not.  In the end I decided not to bother with icodes, mainly because the site is currently only including products from 5 merchants (so it’s relatively easy to update the vouchers manually), secondly because I didn’t want to spend £50 per year on the icodes service.

Aesthetics

Oak Cupboard Website – Added Home Office Cupboards

I’ve now added a new category that focuses on ‘Home Office Cupboards‘ (Oak of course), these are veneered units that are most suitable for Offices, Home Offices and Studies.

I’ve found quite a few products to include in this category, and have been setting up ECU’s for these products and writing the content in order to include these products on my site.  So far completed 3 products in this category, still plenty more to add.

I also noticed that I never completed all of the content for some of my categories (the CD / DVD cupboard and Shoe cupboard categories had no descriptive text or meta data information), so I’ve added a bit of information to these pages.

I’ve also added a Facebook and Twitter Link to the footer of the site.

Although there is still plenty more products to add to the Office Category, I decided to put my changes live now.

Oak Cupboard Website – Promotion using Social Networks

I’ve now started to actively promote my site.

If you like my Oak Cupboard site, please go ahead and click here to Digg it!

I’ve create an Oak Cupboard Squidoo site which is still very much work in progress, but should help with a few links to my site.

I’ve also created an Oak Cupboard Facebook page, I know very little about facebook, but I will try to post information to this page on a regular basis.  I understand I need to get ‘Fans’ of my facebook site, so if anyone has a Facebook account and would like to become a Fan, that would be great.

You can also follow my site progress at Twitter.

Thats about all for today, I’m not that familiar with social networking so I’m learning as I go with this.  If anyone has any advise on promoting on social networks, I’d love to hear from you.

Oak Cupboard Website – Ranked on Google – Page 1!!!

Wow, I’m a very pleased with how my site has been ranked, many of my pages have been ranked on page 1 of Google, and some even at position 1!  I really never expected such good rankings so early.

Some examples are:
‘oak cupboard’ lists my site at the no 8 spot, whilst ‘oak cupboards’ lists my site at the no 7 spot.
‘single door cupboards’ – lists my Single Door Cupboard page at the no 3 spot.
‘alto oak cupboard’ – lists my Alto Oak Range page at the no 1 spot.
‘mobel oak cupboard’ – lists my Mobel Oak Range page at the no 1 spot.

So besides getting over excited about my sites rankings, I have been trying to find some more products to include on my site, I have decided to add another ‘category’ to my site (still working on it), should be able to have this online within the next few days.  I’ve also joined a few more merchants, that sell the products that I want to include in this new category.

I also read a forum post about using icodes for displaying vouchers on sites and ebay partner network for displaying ebay products, I’ve never used either of these on my sites before but they both sound interesting so I have joined them both and am now awaiting acceptance.

Oak Cupboard Website – Getting Indexed

During the early hours of this morning (around 12.30am), I added links to my site from this blog and the affiliate4u forum.  I also placed an ad on gumtree (this usually gets my sites indexed quite quick).

Woke this morning to find that google has visited my site and the home page is now indexed (although not yet cached or ranked), a site:oakcupboard.co.uk search lists my homepage.

Took some advise from a comment posted by Paul and changed my site to use lowercase page names to improve on seo, also setup permanent redirect rules from the old pages to the new (just in case!).

I also generated a sitemap (I use Gsitecrawler for doing this) and uploaded these to Google, Yahoo and Bing.  I have also added my site to Google Analytics, so that I can track visitors.

Just checked google this evening, and found that I now have 35 pages indexed, although most of them point to the ‘uppercase’ page names (glad I put that perm redirect on them).

Oak Cupboard Website – Launched

I am very pround to annouce the lauch of my High Quality Oak Cupboard Price Comparison Site.

www.oakcupboard.co.uk

It’s been a real struggle to get this site completed in time for the launch date, but I must say I am very pleased with my efforts and hope that everyone else enjoys using this site as much as I have enjoyed creating it.

I would love to hear any feedback about this site, both negative and positive, please either post comments on this blog, or complete the comments form on the Oak Cupboard site using the Contact Us Form.

Oak Cupboard Website creation – Day 13 – The Day before Launch

Well we are almost there, will be launching the site in the early hours!

I’ve managed to grab a few more hours than I expected today working on the site.  I’ve added quite a bit more textual information to the homepage and got myself a favicon icon.

I’ve also changed the way the prices are displayed on my site, previously the prices where only displayed on the ‘Product Detail’ pages, this wasn’t great (it was just the way all my previous sites worked, so this site inherited it), I’ve now got it so that the prices are displayed within my ‘Product Listing Control’, therefore the prices are now appearing on the home page and ‘Product Category’ pages.  This is much better and makes it much more of a price comparison site.

I’ve also changed some of the content on the product category pages to be more ‘seo’ optimised (I hope!).

I’ve even started writing some articles for promotion purposes, so I have things ready to be submitted as soon as the site is live.