Pixelwave Website Design Weblog
Latest News from Pixelwave

A client approached me the other day asking me to set up an Amazon Affiliates Store for an electrical goods shop. This is a fairly simple task and doesn’t take too long, so I agreed to do it and it is now ready to go.

The Amazon Affiliate program is one of the longest standing and most respected of affiliate programs on the web. Commission percentages can be around 7% on all sales and with this being backed by Amazons excellent reputation it is an ideal start into the world of affiliate selling on the web.

The Amazon Affiliate Store works in such a way that once set up the products, descriptions and prices are all updated automatically by Amazon. Amazon also of course take care of the order processing, payment and shipping of the products and then simply pay you your commission at the end of each month from any sales your website has made. Of course, nothing is ever quite that easy as you need to make sales and therefore get visitors to your amazon affiliate store first, but if you already have a website with healthy traffic stats then it can be a good way of boosting income.

Aber-Cachers website designed and built by Pixelwave Web Design has now gone live.

The site is an non-commercial site built by Pixelwave Design to cater for people geocaching in the local area and the rest of Wales. Geocaching is an activity I have taken up recently that gets me out into the hills and the fresh air and away from my computer for a time. The site itself allows local geocachers to keep in contact with each other and will help promote the activity in the area. It is also intended as a point of contact for people visiting the area or new to geocaching.

Aber-cachers website is composed of an easy to use set of forums and a photo gallery as well as various subsidiary pages and an Amazon Affiliate Geocaching Shop. It is hoped the site will promote responsible and safe geocaching and that the commission from the Google ads and Amazon Store will pay for its upkeep and hosting costs. It was also a bit of fun for me as a web developer.

If you want to know more about geocaching or would like to contact other cachers, please feel free to join.

Pixelwave Web Design has recently embarked upon a new website design project for South African and Rhodesian Military Engineers.

The website is intended for access by serving members of these regiments and more importantly as a contact point for retired engineers. It’s requirements as a community website therefore makes this project an ideal candidate for a forum based website that will allow members to post and reply to each other in topic based threads. In addition to this there will be a set of hoto galleries that will allow the administrators to add images and photos at will. If required the software used to drive these photo galleries will also allow individual members to have and maintain their own photo albums.

Login and membership details will be integrated throughout the site, and in addition to adding images and posting in the forums members will have their own personal profiles and will be able to send private messages between themselves.

I have had little to go on design-wise, just the regimental colours, so will keep the design clean and easy to use. Once the basics of the website are in place I shall be instructing the administrators on its use and providing support while they attempt to get the online community up and running. In general terms, community based website can be difficult to get off the ground as they tend to need a certain base level of membership to make them attractive to other members. However in this case, the proposed membership is a very distinct set of individuals all of whom will have similar experiences that they wish to share, so hopefully there should be a good base from which to develop a community website.

I’m often encouraging clients to add Content Management Systems or simple latest news weblogs to their websites, so that they can save money on website maintenance, keep their websites up to date themselves and improve the ranking of their websites within search engines.

One of my favourite blogging engines is that of Word Press, and its recent update to version 2.1 menas it is now even better. Pixelwave Wave Design is happy to keep up to date - We now offer our customers Word Press Themes for version 2.1, and of course all new websites we build that incorporate Word Press will use the new updatd version. Just some of the new features new features include:

• Autosave - makes sure you never lose a post again.
• New Tabbed Editor - allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The Lossless XML Import and Export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• The completely re-written visual editor also now includes Spell Checking.
• A redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• WordPress Administration Panels have been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions.
• The Upload Manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.

Click here to view Word Press Themes available through Pixelwave Web Design, and feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding such weblog and Content Management based websites