The new site design has been online for just over a week or so and im feeling pleased with the new design.
It all began with reading LeaLea Design articles on Self branding.
If you followed any of my original posts then you would of read how i took on what Lea did and did some of the tests myself.
It was a very interesting way of working out your own brand but a very valid one. i hav always tried to do something a little different to try and keep the site looking fresh.
Feel free to let me know what you think of the new design.
I decided to stick it out with WordPress as I really like the way it works and most of all the vast amounts of add-ons that are available.
Once i had put the new site up i wondered through my logs to see who may have been looking at my site over the last few months and i kept getting large amounts of traffic from one particular site that i wont mention for now. The site in question had copied my site and as i went on their site bits of the page were all over the place then i saw my new footer at the bottom. i checked out the source code and they had copied the whole site including the lnks to the images and CSS file. Straight away i noticed they were still linking to some of the old graphics. i changed some of the images to make sure they would change them quickly and i also put a .htaccess file onto the site to stop hotlinking.
If you are interested in how to do it, simply put this into a .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?yourdomain.co.uk/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp|css)$ http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/hotlinkimage.jpe [R,L]
Make sure you replace the”yourdomain.co.uk” to be your domain. To make a .htaccess file open up notepage for example and save it to what ver name you wouold like then once you have edited the file upload the file to the root of you web hosting. Then change the name to .htaccess. You usually can’t do this on your own computer as it won’t recognise the extension plus a .htaccess file is usually a hidden file.
Finally make an image andname it hotlinkimag.jpe the reason it is jpe and not jpg is to make sure that your image isnt blocked as well.
The outcome of the above was that the site in question had updated their site within 10 minutes.
I did also send them an email stating that they shold stop copying the site.
I did’t hear from them but they did update their own site. I will be keeping an eye on the site for a while to see if they may try it again.
As far as the new site goes watch out for some new updates just around the corner.
I will be adding a Flash game and some smart little add-ons.
I would like to say a big Thank You to Sarah who helped me update the Wordress install to the latest version after some odd happenings when i tried it 🙂
