Grandma's Attic Member Services - Your Place To Expand Your Experience

Well...I have been at it again: hard at work trying to make this the best possible site for all. I have finally added MY first product; not to be confused with those items sold by or through BCE-GA for others. I had this little box that has been just lying around the house. What is it, you might ask? Well, it is an ATI TV Wonder PRO with Remote Control: an device that you install inside your computer so that you can watch TV on your computer, and do other neet tricks....but alas, I digress. I finally decided that although I had bought this within the last year, I probably will never get around to using it. Not that it is taking up allot of space; but rather that I need the money.

So I did my due dilligence. I "Googled" the product name, and found that it retails for about $99.00 (shipping included) on ATI's site. So I set my price at $59.99 plus shipping (I'm charging the customer $5.00). After getting it entered into my website; I additionally listed the item with eBay. Although when all is done and said, I am not sure if eBay received my listing. I went through my web site to post to eBay...and I got an error message. I will follow up on that a little later. So now that I did all that...what next?

Well, I did what I love doing...I created more pages for my site (he who dies with the most pages, wins...lol). I first created a links page for me (SHA7914_list.html) that will have links to all the products that I will be selling at any one time. When I get other listing customers, I will do the same for each of them as well. Then, I created another liniks page (one level up) that will have all sellers "listing pages" listed in order of Seller ID. And lastly, I linked this page to the top level page in Member Services.

Now, if you know of a particular seller and you want to see what other products or services they may have to offer: now you can do so fairly easily. I still need to create some "cross links" from other pages that relate to one particular seller (IE: Listing Seller's Information Page). I will be doing that next.

One thng I have been thinking of doing as a promotion to encourage listings, is to offfer a FREE basic listing on eBay. This would be the most basic listing, and doesn't include any extras such as bold, highlight, 10 day or any other item. This will only be offered for fully paid ads on Grandma's Attic. Any upgrades or additional fees will be the responcibility of the listing advertiser, and must be paid prior to insertion or upgrade. At this time, I will only be offfering this promotion to regular listing advertisers. If you wish to list as a consignment, this promotion will not apply to you. One exception: if the consignment advertiser wishes to participate in this program, they must pay for the cost of the listing in advance. If their item does sell, they I will refund the amount equal to the normal basic listing rate for their item.

Affiliates Added 051110

Just added 12 new affiliates to our affiliates page. I did this by first creating a table at 4x4 (Wide x High). I then inserted the code I was supplied by Commission Junction (CJ). For each affiliate that I have an agreement with, I had to choose an appropriate banner, image or text link back to the "producer's" home page. I chose to use graphical images at 125x125 pixels...so as not to take up too much space on this page. Even though I created the table at 4x4, I have only used 3 of the rows...perhaps I will add more later. I did also add one banner ad on the Electronics catalog page. I do plan on adding more banners, links and graphics on other parts of the site...but especially under the different catalog headings. I will try to balance this, with not making the site over crowded or an affilate site.

John's Personal Blog: A New Picture Of Me

John's Personal Blog: A New Picture Of Me

Weekly Update: 051108: A Revamped Grandma's Attic

Well hello again from the friendly confines of my mind. Sorry that I am "late" with this, but I hope you will agree that I had a good reason. When I first conceptualized what I wanted Grandma's Attic to look like, I had thought of all of the other sites that I had seen before, and wanted something simular in design (although different in contact and purpose). When I searched for the place to host my site, I knew two things: first, I knew that I didn't want one for those freebie web sites that anyone can get...as I didn't want to put my "professional" e-commerce site on their network, and be limited by their rules and regulations (not to mention the popups or banner ads that I wouldn't even get paid for on my site). Secondly, I wanted to have the (artistic) control, while not having to worry about the nitty gritty of HTML coding. I had came across CitiMax.com: a place where I could build and host my site for a very reasonable price.

As I started to build my site (they give you 10 days for free to try it out), I noticed right away that there were some limitations; but all in all for the money, I could work around most things. In order to get my site looking somewhat professional, I chose a design template, and started entering the text. I found a really cool header that "spoke to me", so I used it. In fact, I saved the image on my computer, and then added some text to more "personalize it". I then uploaded the modified file back to the citiMax site, and am still using the image to this day. But there were things that I didn't like, but didn't know enough of their system to make the modifications. Instead, I plowed forward, adding page after page after page; until I hade a good working knowledge of not only my site, but of their system as well.

Now that the site has been up for a while, I decided to make some much needed changes to the site. The first and most important change I wanted to make was on the home page. To my opinion, there was just too much info, in the form of text, on the page. Second, it was more cumbersom to navigate...and I feared that people wouldn't be sure where they wanted to go; as there were quite a few navigation buttons listed. Lastly, you didn't even know what this site was about until you started reading. To address these issues, the following changes have been made:

• I eliminated about 75% of the text on the page. Most of the information that was their eithor didn't need to be because it was elsewhere, or it just wasn't needed.
• I moved several new products onto the home page, entitled This Weeks Featured Products. In doing so, I eliminated the Featured Products page altogether. By doing so, I hope to encourage purchases right from the start page...instead of navigating to it. Also, by making this change, people now should know right away, that it is an e-commerce site, that sells products.
• I eliminated about 1/2 of the tabs on the Navigation bar. There are now only 10 tabs, instead of the 22-24 or so that were there before. In order to do so, I needed to create a couple of new pages, and then place links to the old tabs in the newly created pages. By consolidating the tabs into "tab families" (logical divisions of related information), I hoped to make the navigation bar less crowded and easier to read.
• I moved the tabs from the left side to the top. I also changed the font type, resized the text, and rezided the tabs themselves. By doing so, I felt that the site would have better symetry, and not look off balance (yes, I really do think of these things).

Lastly, besides all of this, and all the many "little" things that I did, I also created two additional pages that will be used down the road. The first is a FAQ's page (every site should have one), and the second was a Glossery of Terms page. We will blog these items as they become available.

After doing an all nighter from Sunday (11/6) to Monday (11/7) to get these changes made, I slept for about 4 1/2 hours, and then started work at the site again. This time, I had some help from the outside. Two people in particular have helped my: first my friend Katrina from TN, and second, my friend Deb from Iowa. Both gals have helped me in "beta testing" the site; but Katrina has really gone above and beyond the call of duty. Katrina actually went page by page, tyring to hit all the links, and checking for any bugs. With her help, we found a couple of benine bugs: including a typo in the sub-title of one page. Katrina even went as far as to help me run a test sale (using bogus info) to test my systems order handling process. I was given a green lite by both of these wonderful gals. You can read their comments in our Guest Book. If you discover a bug in our system (even a misspelled word) please let us know by writing to us NOW.

I guess if I am going to give any shout-outs, I shouldn't fail to metion my good friend and neighbor, Alvin. Alvin has been working behind the scenes in helping me promote my site by giving out my business cards to his family, friends and business contacts. If everyone did as Alvin has done, I know that this community we're creating would become bigger than any of could possibly imagine. And speaking of my business card: I have just reveived my reworked cards yesterday (11/7). That is the card that you can see at the beginning of this post.

Meta Tag Analyzer tool

Meta Tag Analyzer tool

OH MY GOSH: This site is so cool. Continuing with my "research" from my Googled "tag" query, I found this site on page 2. It is awsome. I did a test on my newly revamped home page (more about that later). It told me that my Title tag was too long: 90 charictors, instead of the maximum of 80. I made some quick changes, and now it is down to 79 charictors. All looked good when I ran the test again. I know that this is not the only tool, and it cannot guarentee any success...but it is more than I had ever expected to be out here...and it is Free.

Back to Basics: META Tags / WebDeveloper.com �

Back to Basics: META Tags / WebDeveloper.com �

Another useful site I found while checking out sites from my "Tag" keyword search. My daughter said she wanted to upload some pic's from Halloween to a site called "Tag", but I couldn't find it. Sounded a little suspicious to me...but then I found so much good info, that I will now be able to use for all of my sites: now and in the futere.

HTML Author's Guide to the Robots META tag

A usefull site I found for information concerning HTML Meta Tags: for Robots.