Free Site School: The Index Page

Free sites - the bedrock of any adult business. This week, I want to look at making a free site in DEPTH, starting with the index page, and following through all the main pages. We're going to look at things like where to put the ads, WHAT to say in the ads, and everything else that you need to know to get one of these essential little sites up and running.

The INDEX page... PART 1

The index page is the start page of your free site, where all of the traffic will come in. This is a very important page of the free site. One thing that you'll see I do with my free site first page is to add a healthy dose of advertising on it. The first page also has to contain a simple warning to make it look like I'm doing my level best to keep out the children. I also need to put the content's title 18 text on here to help keep me legal. Other than that, I can do pretty much ANYTHING I like here.

Much of this tutorial will be devoted to the INDEX page...

Starting ANY webpage and be pretty daunting. Planning things out on paper can really help get you started.

But WAIT! I'm missing out a critical step here: WHAT is this site going to be about? What will the title be? What keyphrases will I be targeting?

I've decided to make a lesbian site so next I have to decide on the main keyphrase for this site, and some others too. It's time to go to Overture and mine a main keyphrase...
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

I type in "lesbian" and start looking down the long list of useful keyphrases. One that I really like, that's not TOO competitively sought after is:

"lesbian love"

I'll use this as the main site title, and as the primary keyphrase on the index page. Now I'm ready to plan out the site, and start building. The site will live in a sub-folder on one of my other domains:
http://www.classy-boobs.com/lesbian-love/

One of the first steps is getting the COLORs right. Play around with the color scheme and see if you can come up with something interesting. You can always make a quick page to test out the color scheme like this:

Here's something that can really help you get going AND make more money. Make the colors on your site match that of the paysite's tour you're promoting.

So I'm happy with the way it's going, and I've made a plan for the page. Planning out a page strategically is very important. You're going to be getting people into this site - just like a theme park, and if you DON'T think about how they'll flow around the pages, and from page to page, you'll lose money. If I do a good job, most of my surfers won't ever see the content pages of this site.

I've got the basic design for the start of my index page now:
http://www.classy-boobs.com/lesbian-love/index-part-1.html

All I've done here is go back and forth from the tour, and pick out the important parts that I found there. I've also worked in some basic search engines text - as a place-holder more than anything else. I'll probably come back and alter this later on.

Remember that graphic ads look really good - but they take AGES to load on a slow connection (which most people have). Always try to do as much as you can with TEXT - and nice CSS effects - and make your ads load as fast as possible. SPEED is so important in making the sale!

I've used three effects on this page which will enhance it's appearance in my target browser - Internet Explorer. While the site will still look good in Netscape - most people are on Internet Explorer, so it's worth making it look even better for those people. The effects I've used are:

- Table rollover
- Glow effect
- Hover over links effect

Please, view the source and take anything you like. I don't have the copyright on these effects, and they're something that anyone out there can use to enhance their pages.

Try to make each new free site, or at least each new 'template', if that's how you work, a bit different from the last one. Keep your brain alive by challenging yourself to reinvent the free site on each major re-model. It's always tempting to go for the 'center everything' feel - but that won't always get the best results. Make yourself come up with new layouts and effects - it's tough as hell but will make more money.

OK, that's where we'll leave the free site for now. Tomorrow we'll look at fleshing this page out, adding more ads, and at the important search engine optimization, as well as the legal requirements and so forth.

Happy building!

TOM ^"^

The State of Things

I was reading some of the webmaster boards last week and some interesting items appeared. Questions were raised about the professionalism of our industry, the state of our freedoms and the extent of electronic snooping.

The first question is about professionalism. Can the adult industry ever be professional? Or does the very nature of it attract the less than professional players. You know the ones I mean - the folks who never quite outgrew locker room humor and fart jokes. The ones who think a webmaster convention is all about party time rather than making business connections. The ones who think that being Big Man on the Convention floor is important.

These people are the same ones who will be more than willing to tell you exactly how important they really are as they down another drink and cop another feel from a porn model. But the real backbone of the adult industry isn't the person stuck in arrested adolescence. It's the people you probably won't see on the floor or on the boards. The webmasters and program owners who just quietly do their jobs without a lot of fan fare and hype.

Any industry has both types of people, porn is not different than 1000 other businesses. It's jsut we seem to attract attention with the ego bound party hounds while other industries tend to keep that sort of thing brushed under the rug.

Privacy issues with email being read by company owners, the government and just about anyone else who wants to snoop are also an issue in our community.

We tend to not say anything as the erosion of freedoms occurs. Then suddenly we look around and go "dayam! when did THAT happen?" There is ALWAYS an excuse for the curtailing of any privacy or freedom.

The snooping advocates will have a million reasons why snooping should be done on different levels. Do they have that right? I don't know. I know the one thing that absolutely positively fries my shorts is any person or agency snooping in my things. It's rude, unacceptable and just damned annoying. I sure as hell don't want anyone poking around in my email, my diary, or any other area of my life I haven't invited them into.

Let's face it the biggest boon to the government was 9/11 - look at all the stuff every level of government got passed into law. Now I still find it odd that we haven't nabbed a ton of terrorists with the Patriot Act but we HAVE grabbed pornmongers or porn surfers with it. Go figure.

It always sounds nice to have the government give us help, protection, and all sorts of neat programs - but we really need to look at the price we pay for big government handling so many areas of our life. At some point we may find as the old cartoon character Pogo used to say "we've met the enemy and they are us".

Well those are my thoughts for the week as I sit here and bake in the heat. Hope you're all staying cool and building like hell for the Christmas season. See ya next week!

Read more about these issues, share your thoughts and comments, or just browse the resources at Webmaster RoundTable.com.

Pest Control

A woman was having a passionate affair with an inspector from a pest control company. One afternoon they were carrying on in the bedroom when her husband came home unexpectedly.

"Quick," said the woman to her lover, "into the closet!" She pushed him in the closet stark naked. The husband, however, became suspicious and after a search of the bedroom discovered the man in the closet.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I'm an inspector from Bugs-B-Gone."

"What are you doing in there?"

"I'm investigating a complaint of an infestation of moths."

"And where are your clothes?" asked the husband.

The man looked down at himself and said, "Why those little bastards."

Niche Focus: Amateur

The amateur niche has an incredible amount of stout followers. This niche runs from girl-next-door types to voyeurism and exhibitionists. As a matter of fact, the only real stipulation required to call a site “amateur” is, well...amateurs.

An amateur site is one created by, maintained by, or centered on amateurs. No professional models allowed! The surfers who come by this site are looking for something other than babes or glamour models. They want the real deal.

Camgirls can be considered amateurs. Horny wives, naughty neighbors, and the basic run-of-the-mill girls are also considered amateurs. These are people who are not models, who have average bodies and faces, and just plain like to fuck. That’s what amateur site surfers are looking for, and if they find a site that they really love, you’ve got members for life.

Because the amateur niche can be just about anything using non-model types, you have an incredible amount of work to do. Decide what you really want to portray on your site. Will it be a single girl site, (which are incredibly popular), or will you have several women on your site? Do you know where to find the traffic you’re going to need in order to get the hits? How will you market your amateur site to new blood, both models and surfers?

Cam sites are some of the most popular, because they allow the surfer to interact with the selected girl. Real-time interaction can be a huge upsell for you, and if you center your site around a single girl who also does some cam shows, the money that you can make is incredible.

Surfers like to be involved in their chosen site, and with an amateur site, you can allow your surfers to interact with the model by way of message boards, polls, and occasionally scheduled chats. Amateur surfers make up a vast majority of all internet porn surfers, because you’re catering to the dream of “this could happen to me.”

The idea that any of your surfers could possibly come into contact with the models on your site is precisely the idea that you want to encourage. You can do this through “diary entries” written by your model(s), detailing how a surfer hooked up with your amateurs. Many times, you can get this done rather cheaply by hiring a writer to write your diary entries.

You can also occasionally insert a photo or two of your model with someone who looks like an average Joe, delightfully penning a small, “Hey, here’s a photo of Member So and So with me at the zoo/club/bar/show, etc.” beneath it. Surfers will see this and go ape, keeping their hopes alive that it might someday be them in the picture.

A good amateur site will have photos that are not terribly photoshopped. You want your girls to look a little rough around the edges; that’s part of what makes them believable. Your site should also be a bit on the “amateur” side in regards to design. If you make your site look too professional, the illusion of amateurity goes out the window.

Things to keep in mind when designing and working an amateur site: Keep it simple. Don’t get overloaded on graphics and hype. Don’t photoshop your girls until they look like Barbie dolls. That’s not the look you want, and it’s certainly not the look that your surfers are after. Keep the content changing, almost on a constant basis. The more stuff you can give your surfers, the more likely they’ll refer friends, and the happier they’ll be.

Keep it believable. Offer something that will keep the voyeurs happy, like short diary entries and “unplanned” photos of your models. Make sure that you keep updates simple but often in order to remain effective.

Take the time to visit a few amateur sites and cam girl sites, and then go for it. Enjoy yourself and soon your surfers will be enjoying themselves too.

Take care of yourselves,
Tala

Dirty tricks in the Net

In fact, all Internet users can be divided into several groups, for example, site visitors, site owners, server owners and hackers (sometimes members of the above-mentioned groups), who dream of bothering everybody. The main goal of the second group is meeting the needs of the first one and preventing harm which can be caused by the members of the last group. Yes, paid site owners are more often subject to all dirty hacker tricks.

Identification

In order to enter a paid site, registered users must input their logins and passwords. Do you know what can happen after the users fill in that form? Naturally, their data are compared with the database, but what’s next? Why users sometimes can’t proceed to other pages, because they are thrown out to the main page? The secret of this trick is that the information is transferred directly to the hidden units of the form. To avoid transferring the user’s name with the password, you should select a random temporary identifier for this user as he enters your site and then work already with it. If the user doesn’t confirm that he’s online in the given period of time, the identifier is unset and lapsed.

Boards and comments

Scripts in Perl help to reduce time immensely, sometimes in indecent purposes. Let’s study simple message boards and comments. They usually include the user’s name, e-mail and a text. How does the record look? There is a form, which includes some fields and a “Submit” button which sends the data to the specified script. Everything is open, you can find the fields, but not fill in them, but simply enter the address which has been created by rules:

http://mysite.com/cgi-bin/board.cgi?id=1*name=Peter*email=&comment=

The simplest variant of protection is fixing all calls to the script in the log-file. You should know at least two things – the record time and visitor’s IP-address. If you don’t have many visitors, you should write other information about the user except for time and addresses - when he ran a script, what kind of browser he has, etc. These statistical data will help to know your visitors better. If your script is very popular and is used by a large number of people, I recommend you to check the frequency of posting for at least the last 5 minutes. Don’t be too lazy to get a separate file for all messages.

Data storing

Both passwords and users’ personal information are stored in usual files, more often in the text format. Numbers of credit cards are stored in the same files; there is nothing super confidential here, unless the format is changed, but it’s not a problem for a smart hacker.

Scripts are usually located in the cgi-bin directory. Basically, the name means nothing; the main thing is that programs could be executed from there. For the sake of simplicity, users’ data files are also stored in the same directory. If the web-server works under the Unix operating system, the rights to any file are defined as rwxrwxrwx. In this abracadabra the first three characters refer to the owner of the file, the following three – to the users group, which the owner belongs to, and the other – to all the rest. R means "read" (reading), w - "write" (recording), x - "eXecute" (executing). The information about rights is shown with the help of octal digits. So, 0666 means that the file can be read and written by the owner, group and all others. There usually are different rights or scripts - 0555 (it is possible to read and execute). The last example is 0700, only the owner can work with the file.

Again, let's return to comments and the rights that we have in data files. The entered records can be looked up not only after their input, but also any time, therefore, we should have the access to reading and recording. As on the majority of servers scripts are executed from the third user group, it means that we should set at least the rights 0006 for files. It turns out, that people have a chance to read and write the data, at once.

Let’s assume that the files are stored in the directory /mysite/comments. You can enter it at http://mysite.com/comments. If the records were saved in rec.dat (http://mysite.com/comments/rec.dat), any curious person is able to get this information. Even if the filename is unknown, with the incorrect customization, one can receive the access to all directories, if he goes directly to http://mysite.com/boards. Then you should determine the rights not only for files, but also for the directories.

If guests or anonymous users can freely get the access to the ftp server, they are also able to change the data. There’s only one exit – you should prohibit the access for anonymous users and store the information in the directory unavailable for ordinary visitors. It’s quite easy. Certainly, you can avoid performing all these procedures by yourself, if you’ve got a powerful content manager.

Even the plans of the most skilled hacker can be failed by using special software. But your chances for the success will be increased, if you will begin protecting your information yourself, relying not only on your own skills, but also on your content manager.

TOM ^"^