My sites

These are a few of my own sites which are where I did a lot of my development and testing for systems which were later implemented for clients. I've gone into some detail as to the build-processes behind these sites so you can see as far as possible how and why I do what I do.

The Acidgfx.com site primarily sells Visuals for nightclubs and VJ content on DVD, by download or post. This is an almost-entirely automated digital media delivery system built from software products I've written over the last few years and can efficiently handle secure, self-policing distribution of files up to 4gb without any data duplication on the server. The webserver gets reconfigured on the fly by a server component and downloads can be set to expire automatically or manually on a given date.

There's still a lot of customisation and work which has gone into it but the basic building blocks are reusable and have by now been "battle-tested" for a couple of years, mainly on this site. You'll probably notice some structural similarities on many of my other sites - we'll they're all based on the same system which was developed around the sales process, and which has a proven sales history.

Acidgfx.com currently ranks #1 in google for "club visuals" and "dvd visuals" - our main key-phrases. I have deliberately tried to pack the site full of original, relelvant info for optimum search-engine visibility and I pursue an aggressive PPC strategy to maximise sales from that field.

Club visuals seems to be quite a small market (in terms of people looking for such online) so it's meant I've had to learn to be extremely efficient with adwords traffic and converting visitors into sales. The sales funnel has approx 98% retention (i.e. once people head to the checkout, 98% complete) and roughly one in 5 people who see the shop home page will buy something. I make extensive use of autoresponders and pre/post-sales support systems which allow me a superb degree of direct contact with my customers .

The downloads side of things concerns full-sized DVD images which can be up to 4gb in size. The last time I checked, 4gb was the largest size of file it's possible to download directly over http, and accordingly we've had to build the process to be very robust to be effective and reliable for worldwide delivery.

I worked with my customers and used their feedback to spec, build and then test the deployment so it works best for them. Consequently we get a lot of repeat business and the recent widespread of broadband access means that downloads now account for around 90% of the site's turnover.

This is a non-commercial fan-site for Volkswagen's 4wd "Syncro" variants. I've been driving (and more recently restoring) one of these cars and this was a site I set up with a friend to provide a place for syncro-nuts to chat and swap a few parts, since spares for the ones like mine are rare to say the least.

The site's now been running over 5 years and has several hundred members on the forums. What started off as a little experiement has grown into a truly international community and worldwide parts/support network. Our forum members regularly send car parts (and sometimes entire drivetrains, sections of car etc) across the globe to each other.

The level of technical knowledge and support is incredible and even though there's not always peace in the valley, the depth and breadth of knowledge has cemented the site convincingly as the Number One resource in its field and it generally occupies the first few places of any search engine you care to test, so from an SEO point of view it's quite interesting. It's also bizzarre that if you type "golf syncro" into google there's the famous VW prototype "yellow zonker", one of the "country" models and my humble little syncro! (from the day I got it).

When I first got my syncro and my gearbox died there were *no* spare gearboxes to be had in the uk (or at least no way of finding them). I had to drive to holland to get one... which is where I met Chris, and we started the site. Now there is no shortage of parts, and anything we're missing gets shipped in from our "friendly" VW dealers in holland (as opposed to our local dealership where the parts staff tend to scatter as soon as there's a customer).

This site is self-sufficient in that it generates a small revenue from Adsense advertising on the forums and photo sections which pretty much covers the hosting and means we can keep the site access free without it becoming a money-pit for me.

As far as we know it's also the biggest free photo library for syncro-related stuff with hundreds of well-documented reference photos of obscure and rare parts.