I’ve been toying with the idea of upgrading or revamping theleavingcert.com for some time. The government confirmed yesterday college fee’s are coming back from 2010 onwards.
So that’s good for theleavingcert.com. Radical new changes to the education system mean more people need more information – that’s where the site comes in. I’ve already played with big sites and beaten them to keywords in google, so the site gets a lot of organic traffic (About 2000 unique visits per month alone from google).
To protect that traffic and protect my google ranking, i’ve decided to keep the site as a blog, but there’ll be big changes. Much like i’ve done with this blog, i plan on revamping it completely. I also hope to recruit some leaving cert students to write on the site once i’m done and dusted and happy with the development work – that’ll be a while off yet though.
I’ll start to write articles from a college student’s point of view and what 1st year college students can expect, change in lifestyles etc… i’ll also blog about any major leaving cert news myself.
theleavingcert.com definitely has potential. There are few websites which are up to date and offer leaving cert students something of value. I have the name, i have the free targetted traffic coming to me from google… now i just have to provide content and keep people coming back.
I’m glad i didn’t sell the site last year, it would have been an excellent investment for someone as a lot of the hard work is already done – quality name, natural free traffic from google, pagerank of 3 etc… it’s like a derelict house in a city center and what i’m gonna do now is modernise which will increase the value 10 fold.
Things are gonna happen next week and they’re gonna happen quickly. Here’s how it’s gonna work;
Monday
- New logo is created, colour scheme decided upon.
Tuesday
- Basic layout & structure of site is decided upon.
Wednesday
- Most appropriate theme is found and i begin to hack the crap out of it to suit my needs.
Thursday
- I start to add plugins and get everything working
Friday
- New revamp goes live
Things have gone stale recently and i’m not happy with my own work rate. Yes i’m passing tests at college, yes i’ve revamped smemon.com but there’s so much more i could be doing.
Smemon.com is now where i want it to be – it looks good, it’s a great insight into my life and it’s a good base to build from.
BeerChief is up and running, it’s not where i want it to be, but it won’t take much more effort to get it to where i want it to be. I just need ‘blocks’ of time as in a full week or two free. I can’t work on BeerChief if i just have a few hours free here and there – i need to be fully committed or not. I have some easter holidays coming up in april though 😈
By the time those easter holidays swing around, i want theleavingcert.com to be fully revamped.
I can then go in to the summer with a world class personal blog, a fresh and funky educational site which fills a niche and then of course my uber ongoing project which is BeerChief.