At this rate I will make $1000 in 23 years. Beat that all you rich Internet kids, 23 years. Here are the five simple steps you can follow so you to can buy $100 worth of crap just by blogging for two years and four months.

1. Get a blog: Duh, this is the easiest step. Find one of the free sites that give out blogs and sign up. Or as I did, have a computer nerd brother that wants you to blog set one up for you and host it.
2. Start off strong: Post a lot, and about really mundane crap. This way anyone who wonders to your site will be bored and your three readers will be your mom, brother and fiance.
3. Get adsense: Sign up, get invited whatever, just get it. Wait about another month and finally implement the code on your site
4. The system: Figure out that what you write about affects who visits your site and what kind of ads you get. Try to write about things you know and are worth a lot of money to advertise. Don’t ask me what those are, I don’t know either.
5. Profit: Keep track of your adsense until you are rich(er) then you where before all of this started.

Remember this take patients and a lot of sacrifice. Well actually very little sacrifice, unless you count the time I could have been spending playing video games.

I had my ads down so low on the site that if you where to visit you might not see them. Where I have them placed now seems to allow people to see the ads but I don’t feel that it disrupts the flow of the site or is to in you face.

For now I am quite happy with Google adsense and would recommend it to anyone who wants to try to make money in their blog. I will tell you that it is not a get rich quick idea unless your blog kicks ass. Since my blog doesn’t necessarily kick ass, but it kicks feet so it works ok.

Unfortunately I had to switch computers before I could finish the transaction so I had to start all over at the beginning. I found the phone selected the plan entered all the porting information and was entering my credit card information when the chat window appeared: “Do you need help selecting a phone?” What? I am about to give you money and you are going to confuse me with un needed help. I think that they need to rethink this and make it so that once you reach a certain point you are not bothered by the often robotic chat helpers.

On their website they have a nice side menu that divides the different games they sell into the Genre of the game (Trading Card, Roleplaying, Miniatures). This gives the illusion of ease of use, however each click leads to its own special site, that would be great if you played one of those specific games or genres, which makes it hard to compare the different genres if you are new to the systems.

Each of these brand specific websites has its own menu with no easy way to get back to the previous screen without a lot of hunting away from the menu. I also found that it seemed that the Wizards of the Coast seem to promote bad Internet. That is a really busy\flashy site with very little content. They seem to be fans of pictures of dragons and warriors and less a fan of explaining what there site is about.

I will be the first to admit that I can be distracted with a picture of a dragon…but come on.

On the top of my list is that they make adding links and other html into a What You See type editor. This way people who don’t know how to make links and other html will be able to add links easier as well as make the overall site navigation easier.

I also wish that there where a couple of shop themes that allowed for simple color changes without having to directly manage the css or the whole theme. Also I found that when I was trying to edit the themes that the updates didn’t happen super fast and it took a little while for them to take shape.

When you are adding games to your MyQ you click a button that says “Rent It”, this works well if you are in the games individual page. When there you the button changes once it is added to your MyQ it changes to say “In Q”. However if you are on the main browsing page it dosen’t change, it continues to say “Rent It”. The site dosen’t let you add it to your My Q again but if you are looking a couple days down the road you might not know if you have added it yet or not.

I also find the sites use of pop up type messages to be annoying. When you click on “Rent It” a message pops up saying that it was added to your My Q, then you have to click on a button to view your My Q or to continue browsing. I find these extra steps to be to much work. I think it would be much nicer if it highlighted the game in yellow or orange and said “Adding to your Q”, the color could then fade to the normal background color allowing quicker browsing and adding if need be.

Also when these pop ups show up it starts you again at the top of the page. If you see three games that you like at the bottom of the page you have to scroll down to them three separate times rather then letting you select multiple games or not forcing the restart at the top of the page.

Also they limit your My Q size. I find this frustrating as I like to add stuff to My Q. I realize that limiting the size makes it easier to manage however since I have two systems I like to add a lot of games and there are at least 25 games of each system that I am interested in playing or at least trying out.

Overall I have found my experience with Game Fly to have been quite good though I do find their site frustrating at times.

I suggested a few things that he could do to make it more user friendly, such as making the menu easier to follow and making one site for his business and one site for the dive club, however he thinks that it works just fine for him and there is no need to fix it.

I have found when talking to people about their websites there is a fine line to walk. For some reason when people make a page in FrontPage and put it on the Internet, they automatically think that it must be a good webpage. Its like they’ve gotten published or something. When you try to make suggestions or offer to try and help they get real touchy and immeadiatly go on the defense.

So here is a list to help as many people as read this make better websites:

1. Make your menu easy to follow and easy to read. Make sure that all of the words associated with a menu item link to that menu items page.

2. Make your site appear as clean and concise as possible. If it dosen’t need to be on the main page, leave it off. Put only pertinant information that cannot be found on other pages on your site.

3. Try to keep all of your navigation items above the crease. The crease is the point where you have to scroll to get more information. As lazy as most Internet users are you do not want people to have to scroll down to get more information.

These are just a few basic rules to follow that will start you on the road to a great easy to use website.

This is a poor way of getting people to sign up for a credit card. It leads you to believe that you will be saving money and then it ends up not saving you anything. It seems to me that if they wanted to make this card available with and immediate savings, then it would make sense. However since you get the $30 after you make your first purchase, which isn’t your current transaction, I find it to be misleading and frustrating.
Other issues with Amazon.com are quite simple. I think that I would enjoy shopping at Amazon.com more if I was allowed to pick which categories I was interested in. I pretty much shop online for books, DVDs and electronics. Other then that I don’t care. I hate when I go to the Amazon.com homepage and find recommendations for kitchen gadgets or clothes. I wish I could set up a custom homepage, or even just put something in my account that says “recommend these things” and poof I would have the recommendations I needed. The main reason I think that this would be beneficial to Amazon.com because it would alleviate what I find to be a very frustrating shopping process. I want to go to an eCommerce site and find what I want easily, I want the options to be minimal.

I understand that Amazon.com is a huge company and it sells everything, however, if you where able to create a custom homepage\recommendation page a la the Google Homepage, I think that it would allow people to find things that they want quickly. Also as with the Ellusionist.com website, I wish that Amazon would make it so there where fewer steps to check out. Since they feel the need to try and get that last impulse buy, they place a page full of recommendations prior to letting you finishing your order.

Another thing that could use some help is the fact that when you are logged in it always asks to confirm your log-in prior to purchasing, I have no problem with needing to confirm my information so others can’t order stuff on my saved credit cards, I would like it more if the log-in itself wasn’t a whole screen, rather a flashing of color highlighting the need for a password. This would allow you to enter it and not have to wait for another screen to load. Also I would think that this would further help prevent any security vulnerability since it would be harder to recreate the content that the person ordered and the amazon generated recommendations then to recreate the generic log-in page.