Isn't it a great feeling to have a site in the bag. The hours or even days of planning, the preparation time spent getting the images and banners ready and all that time spent in actually building the site are over. It's time to relax and take a break before getting into the submit routine right?
Wrong!
It's the time to take a deep breath and go back over your work and make sure you have it right. I speak here from personal, painful experience.
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"Mistakes are very easy to make, silly mistakes are even easier to make and even experienced webmasters make them." |
Yesterday I spent a lot of the day building a TGP gallery and an associated full page ad. Now I don't normally spend that much time building a gallery but this was for a fetish niche that I had never tried before. So I took my time with the text on the site and I spent a lot of time on the full page ad too making sure that I got everything right.
When it was finished I sat back with a big sigh of relief because I didn't even have to submit that gallery. I just passed it across the network to my partner and she did the submission run for me.
There lay the big mistake, not that I gave it to someone else to submit but that I missed out an important step in the gallery or site building procedure. I did not bother to check my work. When I dropped the gallery onto my partner's computer I told her that there were 15 pics in the gallery and there certainly were 15 pics in the folder but there weren't 15 thumbs on the gallery page.
At some point when I was writing the HTML for the page I somehow managed to skip one thumb and while I started with 001tn.jpg and finished with 015tn.jpg I managed to miss 009tn.jpg.
The end result is hours of work that will mostly be wasted because my partner didn't notice the error till right at the end of the submission run. That means that most of the TGPs that the gallery was submitted to will reject the submission because of my blunder.
Mistakes are very easy to make, silly mistakes are even easier to make and even experienced webmasters make them. New webmasters seem to make them more frequently but at least their inexperience is a reasonable excuse.
My first mistake was not to check my work as it progressed. My second mistake was not to check my work when I had finished building the gallery.
At least I did not make some of the other common mistakes that I often see. Here are just some of those mistakes that you should guard against by checking your work as you go and then again when the site or gallery is uploaded and ready for submission.
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1. Make sure that all your banners and text links are actually linked to either your sponsor or your full page ad. You would be surprised at just how many people make the mistake of not linking those correctly or not even linking them at all. Click the sponsor link and make sure that your sponsor's site actually loads in the browser and then check to see that your referrer code actually appears in proper form.
2. Check the link character by character against the link that your sponsor provided and make sure that you have it right. Sending a surfer to your sponsor without your referrer code is about as dumb as you can get because if the sponsor code is not right then there is no way for them to link that surfer back to you if he should decide to join the site.
3. Check your images to ensure that the thumb and resulting big image actually coincide. I've seen many sites where different thumbs point to the same image simply because the webmaster has copied and pasted the link to save time and then forgotten to change the part of the link that refers to each individual image.
4. Once your site is uploaded to the server check your image links again to ensure that the links are not pointing back to your hard drive. Check the code for each link because even if you are checking the site on the server you will still see the image even if the link code points back to your hard drive. You will get the image but everyone else will get the dreaded red "X".
5. Make sure that your recips actually do point to the relevant link list or TGP. Nothing is guaranteed to annoy a link list or TGP owner more than to find his or her recip on a site and then see it pointing to somewhere other than the relevant list. A quick way to make sure that your recips are right is to actually use the recip to access the list to make your submission.
6. And of course, make sure that you really do have the required number of thumbnails and images. There is nothing more embarrassing than to have fewer images than you should - trust me I now know from personal experience.
When all the checking is done, and only then, can you sit back and relax and hopefully watch the money start to roll in.