Wheel of Fortune
Solutions Wheel of Fortune
Solutions Wheel of Fortune
Solutions Wheel of Fortune
Solutions Wheel of Fortune
Solutions Wheel of Fortune
Solutions Wheel of Fortune
Solutions Wheel of Fortune
Solutions

About the Web Site About the Web Site

Brief History

Site Creation Principles

Credits

Submission Engine Links

Brief History

or

Making Money on the Internet is Not as Easy as You’ve Heard

In 2005 I was out of work and look­ing for a means to earn income dur­ing my search for a job.  Already hav­ing a con­sid­er­a­ble set of skills in Com­pu­ter Pro­gram­ming, I decided to attempt to earn money the way that so many others were:  using the inter­net.

To keep this his­tory brief, my attempts focused on 3 areas:  sel­ling my skills, sel­ling prod­ucts pro­duced by others on com­mis­sion, and earn­ing money using inter­net adver­tis­ing.  All 3 failed to gen­er­ate income imme­di­ately to a degree that astounded me.

The Wheel of For­tune Solu­tions web site was my first attempt at earn­ing money purely through adver­tis­ing.  It was also intended to adver­tise my other inter­net money-earn­ing efforts.  As a “niche” web site that had (at the time) only one com­pet­i­tor on the inter­net, it was bound to gain vis­i­tors.  With every vis­i­tor, I earn about 1/6th of one cent in adver­tis­ing rev­e­nue and those vis­i­tors would see links to the other web pages that offered my ser­vices and prod­ucts.

I con­cen­trated on offer­ing a web site supe­rior to that of my sole com­pet­i­tor.  At first, I sim­ply offered a supe­rior (much eas­ier to read and pret­tier) pres­en­ta­tion, a much smal­ler (faster load­ing) web page and a very organ­ized inter­face.  Shortly after, I offered the Spin I.D. page, which allows vis­i­tors to see the win­ning Spin I.D. before the end of the show (and ahead of my com­pet­i­tor).  It also allows the vis­i­tor to easily see if their Spin I.D. has won in the past.  At the same time I began pro­vid­ing descrip­tions and links to the prizes won.  I hoped this would inter­est adver­tis­ers (it didn’t) and also my vis­i­tors who, I thought, might like to read about the places these lucky win­ners were going.

That first year I earned less than $20 from the web site, did not get a sin­gle inquiry regard­ing my offered ser­vices, and con­tin­ued main­tain­ing the web site out of a com­bi­na­tion of des­per­a­tion, hope and the real­i­za­tion that there were peo­ple who were rely­ing on it.  Since that time, the num­ber of vis­i­tors to my site has grown by 400% every year.  In 2008, I earned enough to pay for the web site host­ing.  Now (April 2010) I aver­age over 6,000 vis­i­tors every day, and I earn just about what a web devel­oper should expect to earn for the time spent main­tain­ing this web site — which means that I should be mak­ing an actual profit by the begin­ning of 2011.

The moral to the story:  if you’re try­ing to make money on the inter­net by pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion, it takes a long time and a lot of patience and per­sis­tence.  With 12 mil­lion people watch­ing Wheel of Fortune every week­day, I’ve man­aged to reach only about 1/5,000th of them after nearly five years.

Site Creation Principles

or

What Makes This Web Site Superior to Others

Presentation

Coding

Testing

What About Your Web Site?

Presentation

The pri­mary prin­ci­ple guid­ing my web site pres­en­ta­tion is this:  I want as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble to be able to view my web site.  This is called acces­si­bil­ity.

What this entails is not entirely obvi­ous at first glance.  It means that the web site has to look “good” (well-or­gan­ized) on all brow­sers (not eve­ry­one uses Inter­net Explorer).  It means that the web site has to look right on any com­pu­ter hard­ware:  your com­pu­ter dis­play, my com­pu­ter dis­play and (nearly) every other com­pu­ter dis­play in the world.  It also means that it has to be easy to read so that peo­ple who are vis­u­ally impaired will enjoy vis­it­ing the web site.

Mak­ing the web site look “pretty” is also impor­tant, but def­i­nitely a sec­ond­ary con­sid­er­a­tion.  All the things in the pre­vi­ous par­a­graph have to be done before I worry about how pretty it is.

For a descrip­tion of how I meet all of the acces­si­bil­ity require­ments, see Test­ing below.

Coding

This web site is hand-coded.  What that means is that some­one at Chris­tian Web Pro­gram­ming typed every let­ter of every line of code that makes up this web site.  Many web site cre­a­tors use Web Page Gen­er­a­tor soft­ware.  That is much quicker (you only have to type in the words that appear on each web page), but it pro­duces code that is much less effi­cient (much larger file size) and it pro­duces web pages that do not meet the pres­en­ta­tion require­ments men­tioned above.  Most pro­fes­sion­als hand-code their web pages.

I cur­rently use the free HTML-Kit to type in my code, but I also rec­om­mend the free AceHTML.  HTML-Kit has the sig­nif­i­cant advan­tage of an inte­grated FTP cli­ent (which allows you to upload your web pages to your web site from within the edi­tor).  AceHTML is supe­rior to HTML-Kit in many ways, but lacks the useful inte­grated FTP cli­ent.

This web site is coded using XHTML 1.1, CSS 2.1 and ASP.  These are all stand­ard­ized web page cod­ing meth­ods, which means that web pages cre­ated with them will dis­play on any brow­ser (though not nec­es­sar­ily the same way on all brow­sers).

Testing

Test­ing the pages of a web site is more involved than you might think when attempt­ing to meet the pres­en­ta­tion require­ments men­tioned above. 

  • •Code Validating:  The code of every web page is tested with the W3C XHTML and CSS val­i­da­tors.  This ensures that all the code found in my web pages meets the stand­ards expected by brow­sers.  You can see links to the W3C val­i­da­tors at the bot­tom of every web page.  Go ahead and click on them see if this web page uses valid code.
  • •Browser Testing:  Every web page is tested with the most pop­u­lar brow­sers.  The object is to make sure that each web page has exactly the same lay­out no mat­ter which brow­ser some­one is using.  Cur­rently (April 2010), that includes: It is also nec­es­sary to test all links using Inter­net Explorer 8 because all types of stand­ard links do not func­tion cor­rectly with that brow­ser.
  • •Computer Display Testing:  Every web page is tested at 800-pixel-wide and 1600-pixel-wide res­o­lu­tion.  The pur­pose is to make cer­tain that the page lay­out remains the same no mat­ter what dis­play hard­ware some­one is using.  I use 800 pix­els because (as of April 2010) over 98% of inter­net users have a dis­play at least 800 pix­els wide.  [Source]  Although you can make a web page look nicer if you make it wider, vis­i­tors with a nar­row dis­play will find your web site dif­fi­cult to use.
  • •Resizable Text Testing:  Every web page is tested with dif­fer­ent font sizes to ensure that the lay­out remains intact no mat­ter what size text the vis­i­tor uses in their brow­ser.  For enlarged text to dis­play cor­rectly, you will need a dis­play wider than 800 pix­els.  Inter­net Explorer users:  under the View menu select Text Size and change the size as you like.  For most other brow­sers:  under the View menu select Zoom and change the size as you like.
  • •WCAG Visibility Testing:  WCAG is a set of W3C stand­ards that includes, among other things, stand­ards for web page read­a­bil­ity based on text size and color.  When a web page com­plies with WCAG text size and color require­ments, it ensures that peo­ple with vis­ual impair­ment will be able to eas­ily read the text on that web page.  Every web page is tested using the excel­lent Col­our Con­trast Ana­lyser tool (avail­a­ble only for Fire­fox).  You will also notice that I use larger text than most web sites:  this is in pur­suit of the same goal.  Finally, I choose web page col­ors that sat­isfy WCAG require­ments using my own tool now avail­a­ble online, the Web Site Theme Cre­a­tor.  As far as I know, this is the only tool avail­a­ble that allows you to choose from all the web page col­ors that meet WCAG stand­ards.

What About Your Web Site?

CWP
Christian Web
Programming Your web site can achieve the same high-qual­ity stand­ards that you find on this web site.  Chris­tian Web Pro­gram­ming offers free quotes, extremely com­pet­i­tive rates, pro­fes­sional qual­ity and guar­an­teed sat­is­fac­tion.  Chris­tian Web Pro­gram­ming also offers free access to the Web Site Theme Cre­a­tor.  Finally, Chris­tian Web Pro­gram­ming always grants the cus­tomer cop­y­right priv­i­leges to the fin­ished web pages.  Nearly all pro­fes­sional web devel­op­ers retain the cop­y­right to your web pages — which means that if you ever decide to switch web devel­op­ers, they are not per­mit­ted to make use of your exist­ing web pages that you spent your hard-earned money and time get­ting just the way you wanted.

Credits

The following images are courtesy of the official Wheel of Fortune web site:

Spin ID Check Site

Wheel of Fortune web site

All Spin I.D.s and puzzles are from the Wheel of Fortune TV show.

It’s Farming Time Mule This image is cop­y­righted by, and is a reg­is­tered trade­mark of, It’s Farm­ing Time®.
Stewart’s Crafts This image is cop­y­righted by Stew­art’s Crafts.

Valid XHTML 1.1! Valid CSS! These images are cop­y­righted by W3C and used with per­mis­sion.

All graph­ics other than those noted above and those asso­ci­ated with sub­miss­ion engines below are the cre­a­tion and prop­erty of Chris­tian Web Pro­gram­ming.  All other aspects of this web site, includ­ing lay­out, markup, scripts and style sheets are the cre­a­tion and prop­erty of Chris­tian Web Pro­gram­ming.

Below are free Sub­mis­sion Engines that I used in the past to post my sites to search engines.  You can see how effec­tive each was at the time that I used it.

Graphic Link Text Link Last Sub­mis­sion Auto­matic Sub­mis­sions Man­ual Sub­mis­sion
Graphic Link Text Link Last Sub­mis­sion Auto­matic Sub­mis­sions Man­ual Sub­mis­sion
Submit Express Search Engine Opti­mi­za­tion and Free Sub­mis­sion 4-10-2007 7 4
Search Engine Submission and Search Engine Optimization AddMe.com, Search Engine Sub­mis­sion and Opti­mi­za­tion 5-14-2007 10 1
free website search engine submission seo optimization Free web­site search engine sub­mis­sion seo opti­mi­za­tion 11-4-2007 18 0
Submit Your Site To Top Search Engines Free! Site­Pro­mo­tion Free Web­site Pro­mo­tion 6-16-2007 4 0
Submit Your Site To The Web's Top 50 Search Engines for Free! Free­Web­Sub­mis­sion - Sub­mits to 20 search engines for free 9-1-2007 16 1
none Sub­mit your site to doz­ens of top search engines for FREE.  No strings attached! 10-3-2007 8 10
none free search engine sub­mis­sion 4-2-2008
none OrangeSubmit 12-3-2008 ? ?
Submit Your Site To The Web's Top 50 Search Engines for Free! FreeWebSubmission.com 12-5-2008 16 0
Submit Express Search Engine Opti­mi­za­tion and SEO Tools 3-3-2009 7 2
Questions?  Comments?  Suggestions?