"Yicrosoft Directory" watch daily as a website is made for the “2008 King Noob SEO” Contest!

Yicrosoft Directory

The Yicrosoft Directory is an entrant in the “2008 King Noob SEO” Contest!

The point of the contest is to build a brand spankin’ new site, and at 8pm Central on March 4th, whoever’s site/blog ranks highest for the keyphrase "Yicrosoft Directory", wins all sorts of fabulous stuff, including a grand prize package worth over $700!

I've entered with this domain: the-yicrosoft-directory.com I'll be using this as an exercise in getting a site up & running quickly, at low cost & along the way I'll be sharing with you the steps I'm taking; not only to rank well in the competition but to have a well designed site too.

Don't forget to refresh the page or clear cache/temporary internet files each day to ensure you see the latest content!

My Yicrosoft Directory story so far:

The Sixth Yicrosoft Directory day ...

I have to confess that it was a struggle today to even write this!

Today (Sunday) was such a lovely day here in Melbourne that the last thing I wanted to do was to work.

I took the kids to a local park to see Magic Sally, A Faerie Rock Band. The band kept plugging the web site & had some very nice advertising material, C.D.'s for sale etc .. when I got home I checked out the website: magicsally.com They have some great stuff on there but the site is bad from a usability point of view, I wonder if they realize the lost opportunity from this site?

So, back home for some Lambrusco & a Barbie .. the Yicrosoft Directory template will come tomorrow!

The Fifth Yicrosoft Directory day ...

As I mentioned before, I'm going to be using sNews for my "Yicrosoft Directory" contest entry's CMS

They say:

"sNews is a completely free, standards compliant, PHP and MySQL driven content management system. Consisting of only one small core file, sNews is extremely lightweight, easy to install, and easy to use via a simple web interface

sNews uses search engine friendly URLs throughout, to make your website truly loved by Google and other search engines (as well as your visitors). This makes a sNews driven site highly Search Engine Optimized from the get-go and will greatly assist in your site obtaining a good SEO ranking.

sNews requires PHP, MySQL and mod rewrite. If your server meets those requirements, get started and learn how to install sNews on your website in 3 easy steps."

I say:

"I've used this CMS a few times before with great success, it's actually the CMS I chose for the new version of my ozwebfx site & I think it's a perfect choice for my Yicrosoft Directory contest entry."

A great place to "test drive" sNews & other CMS's is opensourcecms.com

I'm going to work locally on my computer whilst I'm getting sNews set up for my new Yicrosoft Directory template & then transfer it to my hosting account so I head over to Can I work with sNews locally?

All I need to do is install a free application bundle on my computer so it will run like a real, live Apache/MySQL server. It isn't as complicated as you might think, this tutorial will walk you through the steps.

I'm going to install XAMPP Windows 1.6.5 I did have a previous version on my PC but it wasn't being used at this time so I Uninstall the previous version then download the Installer version. Now I read Method A: Installation with the Installer I double click on the xampp-win32-1.6.5-installer.exe I install Apache & MySQL but not Filezilla as my preferred FTP client is WS_FTP Pro.

The installer starts the server & I browse to http://localhost/xampp/index.php The first thing I do is click the Status link on the left .. Hooray! All is working fine. I browse to file:///C:/xampp/htdocs/index.html & see the It works! message. Now from the directory /htdocs i remove all except:

/contrib
/forbidden
/restricted
/xampp

I now open up the file xampp/apache/conf/httpd.conf & Scroll down to line #118 and see: #LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so. The # sign at the start of the line makes the line inactive. I remove the # sign to active the line, this line will load the mod_rewrite module so my sNews site will function, I save and close the file. Now I stop & re-start the Apache Server.

Now its time to download & install sNews for my Yicrosoft Directory

From the Installing sNews page I browse to the Download page I choose the sNews 1.6 zip file. I extract the zip file to C:\xampp\htdocs\sNews16, if you don't have an unzipping program, download one for free from my SOFTWARE SECTION of my ozwebfx website.

I open C:\xampp\htdocs\sNews16\sNews16 & delete the .DS_Store file then copy all files there to the main \htdocs directory, now I delete the sNews16 directory.

I browse to: file:///C:/xampp/htdocs/readme.html the first thing I'm going to do is to setup the database. I Open the XAMPP Home Page, & Click on the phpMyAdmin link from the sidebar on the left under "Tools", underneath the Create new database text is a text area, type in whatever you want to name your new database, I'm going to call my database for the Yicrosoft Directory "ydsnews1", the next text area says "Collation" I choose utf8_bin & click "Create". A message appears: "Database ydsnews1 has been created."

At the top of the page is a button SQL I click this & underneath "Run SQL query/queries on database ydsnews1:" is a text area, I browse again to file:///C:/xampp/htdocs/readme.html & select all the code for the database & copy, I then paste this into the text area in phpmyadmin & click the "Go" button, I then receive a message: "Your SQL query has been executed successfully" & in the sidebar on the left I can see 4 links:

articles
categories
comments
settings

Clicking on the "ydsnews1 (4)" link above those 4 will take me to the ydsnews1 database for my Yicrosoft Directory.

Now it's back to the Read Me file #2. Edit Settings so I fire up Dreamweaver to open the file "snews.php" inside C:\xampp\htdocs

I only need to change 4 lines:

One:

$db['website'] = 'http://localhost/sNews16/';

to:

$db['website'] = 'http://localhost/';

Two:

$db['dbname'] = 'snews'; //Database Name

to:

$db['dbname'] = 'ydsnews1'; //Database Name

Three:

$db['dbuname'] = 'username'; //Database Username

to:

$db['dbuname'] = 'root'; //Database Username

Four:

$db['dbpass'] = 'password'; //Database password

to:

$db['dbpass'] = ''; //Database password

Now I'm ready for action! I browse to: http://localhost/index.php & I can see that all is working as the image below shows:

So now I have all the tools I need available to start converting my template for the "Yicrosoft Directory" to work well with the sNews Content Management System

Tomorrow I'll edit the template & post here to tell you what I did & the day after I should be able to upload it to my hosting account.

P.S. Here's how my my third yicrosoft directory page Looked.

The Fourth Yicrosoft Directory day ...

I have a fiddle about with this template today, it's not looking too bad I think, compared to my third yicrosoft directory page.

I run the code through HTML Validator, a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside the Firefox Browser. I'm really just getting a feel for this template & have decided that for the sNews conversion that I will try to stick as closely to the original idea at first, I'll then release that first as "Yicrosoft Directory Template V1" & at the end of the contest I'll release whatever butchered version I've come up with as "Yicrosoft Directory Template V2"

I had a look in my AWStats & found a link from A free online advertising and text link network called adgridwork, I added it to the right column. I'll test this service out & let you know all about it.

I'm a big fan of sitepoint & a regular buyer of their books so in the left column I put a link to The Search Engine Marketing Kit.

I had an unsolicted email last night from:

"a Delhi-NCR, India based, and leading web services
 company with main

    competency in link building.

    We have a dedicated team of 60 professionals 
to serve you. We build the

    natural quality and theme based links
 as one-way or reciprocals links with

    our manual process."

I had to laugh at the use of their word ETHICAL in their spammy letter!

I fired up Adobe Fireworks CS3 to make a new Yicrosoft Dirctory Logo, It's not quite what I want but I'll get back to it later.

So Tomorrow I'll convert this template for the sNews Content Management System & let you know what else I've done.

The Third Yicrosoft Directory day ...

Today I write about what I've done so far & sit down with pen & paper to think a few things through. I decide that as I only have One Hour a day to work on my Yicrosoft Directory entry that I will use an open source template to get the site going, the Yicrosoft Directory template is this & is available for Free Download

I'm going to put this template on the site tomorrow & then later convert it into an sNews template for public release .. I'm going to be showing you exactly what I do at each step to come up with a unique design from this starting point.

The Second Yicrosoft Directory day ...

I falter already! I have my children to look after, work to do, clients to meet ... things to do places to go .. yada yada yada .. I do manage to tidy up the first page a bit though & here is my second yicrosoft directory page

As you might see I really only added a bit of info about the Yicrosoft Directory Competition & added a few bits & pieces in the header:

Most of which I just copied & pasted from a previous project .. now, lots of people are wondering these days whether Google puts much relevance in Meta tags these days .. I think that we again should look at the horses mouth; Matt Cutts.

The First Yicrosoft Directory day ...

At 8pm Central time in the U.S.A. on February 4th (Monday night), a post went up on SEONoobs.Com announcing the keyphrase "Yicrosoft Directory". At that moment it returned no earch results in Google.

I was a bit slow off the mark in getting started as I had not bothered to check the time difference between Australia, where I'm based with Central time in the U.S.A. :(

I went to my preferred place to register my domain name: babyweb.nameservices.net/domainregistration This site is mainly only used by me to register domain names for myself & just a few customers who don't want the hassle of doing it themselves if I am working on a web design project for them. It's a reseller account from: aitdomains.com & makes me a few bucks only. The reason I use it is because I like to have most of my domains registered at the one place, it just is much easier to manage. A quick search soon told me that my most preferred names had already been quickly snapped up so I settled on: the-yicrosoft-directory.com Google's Matt Cutts recommends dashes or underscores for words in urls, the full nerdy explanation is at: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

The next step was to set up a hosting account for my new Yicrosoft Directory domain name. I resell hosting accounts through my website: ozwebfx My provider for this is WebOnce Technologies who manage their own gear at liquidweb facilities As soon as I had finished setting up the hosting account I checked the URL: http://www.the-yicrosoft-directory.com .. the domain was already live, this is not unusual using the routine I've described but has surprised many customers in the past with such a quick propogation.

So now I have a domain name & a hosting account I fire up Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, I copy & paste from the google search page for "Yicrosoft Directory" the only four results that I see & I have my first yicrosoft directory page

My next step is to add my the-yicrosoft-directory.com to the Google add url page , I then make a quick post on my website: http://ozwebfx.com/blog/yicrosoft-directory/, Another quick post on StumleUpon with the tag yicrosoft-directory & my self allotted hour is up!

"Yicrosoft Directory" SEO Help entry by ozwebfx

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