A brand new, one of a kind, site has been recently launched - and has instantly enjoyed large success and growth in numbers and participation.

This site, is Teenternet.

After traveling around the internet - and browsing online web designer message forums, I was dissappointed at the lack of a teen/young webmaster’s forum. I quickly scrambled to produce the website, and much to my surprise, it has been met with a huge reception in the young web designers community. Membership is quickly growing, and discussions are beginning to rage. Topics include HTML, SEO, PHP - and even a non topic “Mall” forum; where anything can be posted that’s on member’s minds.

There’s only one thing we’re missing in the young web designers community of Teenternet. YOU! Feel free to check out the brand new, premiere site - and join in on our conversations. What better way to learn than from people your own age, and with the same interests & goals in life.

Direct link to Teenternet: http://teenternet.com

Well, I’ve got to go - there’s a lot to be discussed over at Teenternet…

Have you ever visited a web page where the links were all formatted as “click here,” instead of a keyword rich link statement? Let’s take for example the following sentence found in a website - in two different variations.

If you’d like to purchase blue widgets from our online store, please click here.

If you’d like to purchase our products please visit our blue widget online store.

As you can see from the example, the bold text represents where a link to the widget store could potentially be placed. Which sentence is formatted better, search engine & user wise? The second. Linking to the online store using a keyword rich phrase generates a better inbound link to your linked page, allowing you to increase your rankings, as well as allowing for a more unique, rich web site or blog.

Take a look at my collection of Free Animal & Pet Avatars for use on forums, Neopets, MySpace, Bebo, Xanga - or anywhere on the web! All avatars are 100 by 100 pixels in size. Please save the avatar to your computer and upload - no hotlinking. A link back to Smart Boy Designs or a small donation would be greatly appreciated. If you have a request for a certain design idea - just let me know!

September 1st-5th, 2008, I’ll be uploading a whole bunch more pet and animal avatars. Stay tuned!

If you were to take a look at my web site’s statistics pages, you would see that the plotted line representing my traffic levels is taking a downhill dive. Should this be normal for my sites? Is this something to worry myself over? Analyzing your site’s statistics and traffic is crucial in helping to pinpoint whether or not the holiday season will bring you glad tidings of visitors - or bad tidings of a deserted web space.

Analyze Your Market & Topic

Let’s take for example a site dedicated to cooking vs a site based on homework tips for kids. Just think for a second - more people naturally start cooking during the holidays, so the cooking site is definitely going to sky rocket when it comes to traffic at this time. On the other hand you have the homework tips website. For most all children I know, when it’s Christmas time - school is the last thing on their minds. The point I am trying to make here is to start thinking logically about the situation of your topic.

Another facet that must be taken into consideration is your web site’s target audience and market. If a web site’s traffic is generated primarily from the United States of America - that web site will take a heavier hit during Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc…as these holidays are celebrated with greater intensity in a country like a USA.

Conclusion

The reason for analyzing your traffic levels during the holidays is that it provides a “map” of what normal levels should be during these times. It helps to calm those nerves - and provide comfort to know whether or not your traffic should increase or subside.

And just hold in there a bit longer - traffic usually explodes for me with the coming of the New Year.

At this time I would like to share a little story with you - a horrible story that will make you cringe.

It was about this time last year that I decided to transfer one of my Blogger blogs to a new, hosted website. The blog was getting enough hits and it had enough of a following that it was ready for its own space on the web with hosting/domain name.

So I decided to delete my Blogger blog - and that’s when all hell broke loose.

Basically within days - I was attacked with a barrage of emails from concerned customers. Every one of them was accusing me of having an adult website on my old blog. So I typed my old blogger address in my browser - and lo and behold, my old blog had been taken over by an Adult Friend Finder spam portal. Curse those idiots.

Now all of my old backlinks that were pointing to the adult blog - and my image and company name was being ruined as the time crept along.

I immediately clicked the “Flag Blog” option in the top navbar, but knew this wouldn’t be enough to get the blog deleted. So I quickly fired off an email to Blogger Support asking to have the blog removed because of inappropriate content.

Luckily they deleted the blog - and I reclaimed it. I must say that the people at Blogger were very helpful in helping to reclaim my account.

Sadly, not everyone will have the same luck when something bad likes this happens to their Blogger account - so I suggest that you NEVER delete an old Blogger blog, to protect yourself from the same madness that happened to me. I made a mistake - and I learned my lesson.

Another added benefit of keeping an old blog is that you can leave a last post message with the URL of your new website location - pointing blog visitors to your brand new website. I was stupid not to do this in the first place. This way, your old blog visitors can slowly trickle into your new site. No matter what your situation don’t do what I did. Keep your Blogger account.

I guess I can now officially checkoff adult content as something I have published on a website. ;-)