The Moment of Zen Theme on Squidoo

Squidoo has updated its default template with a nicer shade of blue and better overall design. Not only that, lensmasters now have a choice of another seven themes with different colours.

The lenses look much better. I really like the new designs. The choice of themes means we can reflect the character of the subject of the lens now. For example, I wrote a lens called Should Art and Antiques be Restored or Not? I feel that it’s what is sometimes called a ‘think piece’ so I’ ve used the theme Moment of Zen which gives it the appearance of a newspaper article. I think it works with this kind of lens – of course, you might totally disagree.

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What will happen to the UK antiques trade in these straitened times? It has been struggling since 9/11 when many Americans stopped travelling abroad. This situation continued with the fall of the dollar against the British Pound which made buying here in Britain too expensive for most Americans.

What must be understood is that American dealers, coming here and filling containers to sell in the USA, has been one of the driving forces of the UK’s antiques trade. When they stopped coming, so trade became more difficult. Over the last 7 years, antiques fairs (shows) have gone out of business or cut back on the number of events each year. In the middle and top of the market, dealers have cut back on the number of fairs they were willing to do. Just covering the stall (booth) rents and other costs involved has become harder. Making a reasonable profit for the risk and time has become something of a miracle.

Meanwhile, stores and antiques centres have closed and many older dealers have retired.

Tastes have changed. Now brown furniture is hard to sell for a decent price. Many other antiques are no longer particularly fashionable either. Over the last 10 years, here in the UK, we have seen minimalism become fashionable in home decorating and it’s a style that doesn’t suit many antiques. Of course, Art Deco and other modern items do fit in with this kind of decor and prices have risen in some areas.

Now the recession has started to bite. Banks are unwilling to allow small businesses, like antique dealers, to have overdrafts. Without this facility, dealers can’t buy fresh stock so their stock doesn’t change. If they do fairs, they are taking much the same things to fair after fair and regular visitors have seen it all before and don’t buy it. Prices for many antiques are low in the auction rooms too so offloading ‘tired’ stock there won’t raise much.

It’s not all doom and gloom for everyone. Some dealers have transferred their businesses to eBay and their own independent websites. They have adapted their stock and prices to the new conditions and so can make a living and, in some cases, a good profit.

The very top dealers, with good client lists and contacts among the richest collectors, can still sell profitably but these don’t generally have the trickle down effect on the rest of the trade that can come from a healthy middle market in antiques.

When the kind of dealers who do the Olympia Fine Art & Antiques Fair, Penman Fairs and other good multi-day fairs sell well, they then go out and look for new stock. They buy from smaller fairs, dealers and antiques centres. In turn, these dealers need to restock and start visiting the one day fairs, car boot sales and part time dealers. This is the trickle down effect.

The other factor against the antiques trade is the fall in the housing market. Whenever this has happened before, the sales of antiques has fallen. If people aren’t moving house, they don’t buy much furniture or other objects.

Is there any hope? I don’t know. The most enterprising dealers will survive the recession with their businesses intact but probably not without changes. It will be interesting to see how those dealers alter their buying and selling habits to run successful businesses.

When I came here to write about my birthday, I was shocked to find it was almost 3 weeks since I’d last written anything. The reason was that I decided to move my other blog from Wordpress to my server under it’s own domain name. It’s called Stazjia’s Commentary and is mostly more serious than this blog. That’s why I started this one so I could write about more light hearted topics which didn’t fit there.

I’ve installed cms on websites before but never blogging software and hit some small problems which held me up. I solved them, mostly through trial and error. I then installed it in a sub domain of an long standing website I run with a friend. I definitely wanted ‘pretty URLs’ there and that gave me problems. I made such a small mistake setting them up and it took me two days and four reinstalls of Wordpress. I could have given myself such a kick when I discovered the answer.

That sub domain is called Chocolate Recipes and the clue to content is in the name! I’ve stilled got a lot more recipes to put on yet.

So there you are – you’ve got the brand new, shiny website, pages on a network or lenses on Squidoo and you sit back and wait for visitors. Maybe you check your stats regularly and they reveal a dismal picture. No visitors! Or maybe you have one or two but you’ve got a feeling that they were your mother and your bestfriend. As an easy, get rich quick scheme, you’re off to a bad start – without an audience, there’ll be no clicks on Adsense or sales on Amazon or other affiliates.

So what do you do? First, register your site, page or lens with Google, MSN and other search engines and directories. This probably won’t act like a magic wand unless you are very, very lucky so you can’t sit back and relax.

We are lucky now, there are so many ways to promote webpages. When I did my first site in 1998, webrings were the best known way. Google didn’t exist, the big search engine was Alta Vista.

Now you can use the social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc, to promote your site. You can bookmark it on digg.com, del.ico.us, stumbleupon.com, mixx.com and scores of others. You can write a blog and promote it there. Watch out for a new one called Tagfoot, it should be out of beta testing soon.

You can’t just choose one of these. You’ve got to use as many as time allows. On the social sites, you’ve got to do the friendly stuff otherwise nobody will look at your entries. You’ve need to gather friends on many of them and by that I mean, ask other members to be your friend and then keep up with them. You’ve got to check out their links and reply to messages.

An important point is you must not, under any circumstances, spam these sites. You cannot flood them with your links. If you do, many of them will blacklist you. At best, other members will ignore your links.

If you are, like me, a member of Squidoo, there are many other sites you can use in addition to the ones mentioned above. See the Directory of Squidoo Lens Directories for links to them.

A simple way to promote your website or pages is to include a link in your signature. Be reasonable – if you have 10 webpages or lenses, don’t list them all, that would look silly.

Finally, the best way to keep visitors coming is to provide good content that people want.

Picture: My latest lens ‘Classic Poems for Kids‘.

A friend and I used to run a network of sites called All Info About which we started officially in September 2001 although, of course, we had spent about 5 months setting it up. Individuals wrote sub-sites on specific subjects, much like about.com. It was reasonably successful, in as much as it covered it costs after the first couple of years, until we made some changes. We forgot the big thing of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” To cut a long story short, some of the changes made meant we went from being Google’s darling, to having trouble finding any of our pages at all there. Before this, I knew that any page I published would almost certainly go on to the first page of results for main keywords within 24 hours. I had several pages that came up number one. My best achievement as far as Google was concerned when my page on Wimbledon Tennis Championships came up at number one just before and during that year’s event, above the club and BBC.

Anyway, last year we had to make the decision to cut All Info About back to just my own and friend’s pages. We helped all the webmasters as much as we could to move their content and gave plenty of notice. We couldn’t afford the cost of the and exclusive server with lots of extra RAM that we needed. With just two of us, we could move to a shared server with no extras needed. We pay less a year now than we were paying per month before.

This coincided with personal problems of my own. I had a mini stroke (TIA) a year ago (Sept 2007), luckily the symptoms disappeared after a few hours. This has turned out to be caused by a serious and untreatable vascular problem so I have retired. I got the news about the cause of the TIA in May this year. As luck would have it, there have been serious family problems going on as well so I was under considerable stress.

All of this meant I lost all interest in my old websites. I hate failing and letting down other people. We had gone back to old html pages from CSS and I don’t like the look of them either. I was ripe for a change because I like writing and researching. Then I found I could do what I liked on Squidoo so have worked hard at that all summer, becoming a Giant Squid this month.

At last I’ve had the incentive to go back and look at my old sites because I was still receiving stats reports from Sitemeter and traffic was going up. Many pages were back on the first page of Google results and that was without me even looking at them for months. Incredible!

Yesterday, using search and replace, I got rid of a lot of the out of date elements on the template like a search facility that didn’t work because we hadn’t moved the program to the new server, and other elements that were pointless or 404′d now.

I’m thinking about using something like Wordpress for future pages to give a more up-to-date look but I’m not rushing into anything. I don’t want a difficult, time consuming program that will take ages and a degree in nerdish to set up.

If you have any opinions on what I should do, take a look at All Info About London and All Info About Diets & Nutrition.