Buying a website is a complicated process and it should not be done by someone who has no clue of what he is getting into. The real price of a website is determined by many factors and definitely not by the seller of the website who, more often than less, wants to earn as much money as possible from the sale of the website.

This article is going to evaluate the important factors and takes a look at several other - lesser important - factors as well. A potential buyer needs some knowledge to be able to calculate a price for a website in the same manner that someone who has knowledge about cars will fair better when purchasing a car than someone who does not know anything about cars.

Technical knowledge, as in programming languages, is not that important when buying websites. They only have to be considered in some special cases, for instance when buying a web application. A buyer needs knowledge in SEO and website monetization among other things to evaluate a website.

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Godaddy offers a system called Total DNS Control that makes it very easy to change DNS settings of domains bought at Godaddy. I use it mainly to redirect the domain name to the correct server using Godaddy’s nameservers. It worked fluently for several years until I recently ran into a problem.

Whenever I tried to change the DNS setttings I received the message: The Total DNS Control Manager for this domain is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later. which was worrying me. It took me two days to figure out why this was happening all the time. First I thought it was a problem at Godaddy and that waiting would solve it.

It did not change for two days and I decided to look at other possibilities. I realized quickly that it was related to cookies. I use a deny all cookies unless I have permitted them explicitly extension in Firefox. What I did not realize in the beginning was the fact that Godaddy redirected the request from their own domain to a secureserver.net domain. And cookies were not permitted for that second domain.

I quickly added that domain to the list of permitted websites and was able to edit the DNS entries in Total DNS Controls from then on again.

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I recently purchased a software called Directory Submitter which aids in submitting your websites to directories. The major problem I had with directory submissions was that it really took a long time to submit your websites even if you had a list of directories at hand.

The usual process was to visit a directory, navigate to the category that you wanted to place your link in and click on a link on that page to submit your website. Some websites required you to create an account first, some to purchase the listing and others to put a reciprocal link on your website.

You had to enter lots of details about your website like site title, description, category and keywords but also personal information like email, username and password in a form and it really was a boring process that took really long for each directory even if you did make use of copy and paste.

Directory Submitter was advertised by Vic who is running his website Blogger Unleashed and I thought to give it a try. I thought it would be a fully automated software which it is not, more about this later.

The software costs about $70 and gives you the option to buy Keyword Elite and SEO Elite for 50% off after the purchase.

Once you start Directory Submitter you are prompted to create a first project. A project basically contains the information about one website that you want to submit to the directories.

You add all those information that directories request once. This includes personal information as well as Titles, Keywords and Descriptions. Yes that is right, you can add more than one in each field to add variety and avoid duplicate content.

Directory Submitter offers a list of about 2200 directories after updating the list of available directories online which consist of paid and free directories. There is unfortunately no information if a free directory requires a reciprocal link or not and no way to create those from within the software.

Several directories are not working anymore and it takes some time to kick those from the list.

The process to submit a site to a directory is still manual. The program comes with a browser that is used to navigate the websites and find the submit url link. The data is entered automatically most of the time except for the category and captcha. Directories that require a login before submission are taking the longest to submit to because you need to enter additional information and normally confirm your email.

Directory Submitter saves you the time to fill out those information manually but that’s pretty much it. I really had hopes that this software would automate the process a bit more. Don’t get me wrong you save time and the manual approach has some advantages like being able to edit the information that are automatically entered in the form for instance or picking the right category.

While you save time you will still be busy submitting your website(s) to those directories. My estimation is that it takes at least 5-6 hours to go through the list once even if you only select the free directories.

I did remove all the directories that would lead to a 404 from the list to speed up things the next time I would run a new project in the software.

It is possible to add new directories to the software which is definitely nice but also lots of work. I guess Directory Submitter is a nice software if you submit to directories regularly. It does save time and that’s the main advantage of the software. If you only submit to directories once or twice a year you might consider this carefully since a directory submission at some webmaster forums can be bought for roughly $10.

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Wordpress 2.5 has been released and I really can’t help it but I don’t like the admin interface at all. The use of low contrast colors in several menus and some other usability issues make me wish there was a way to select the old admin interface instead of the new one.

Although that is not possible yet I would like to introduce two plugins that change several elements of the new Wordpress 2.5 admin interface. One is a new theme that can be used instead of the two available ones and the other makes use of the full width of the screen instead of just 80% or even less depending on the monitor resolution.

Admin Big Width:

This plugin sets the width of the admin interface to 100% which means that it is finally possible to make use of the full screen resolution.

JP Admin StylishBlue

Did you know that you can change the default Wordpress 2.5 admin theme to a classic theme in your user profile ? This plugin adds another theme that can be chosen in the same menu.

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