Well, finally we are on-line and fully operational.

The CMS is Wordpress 2.8.3

The shopping cart is WP-eCommerce 3.71

I will blog about WP-eCommerce and the other plug-ins in later posts.

For today’s post, I want to discuss the setting up of a pay-per-click account, and pass on some information that cost me 2 hours of productive time. I first went to Google and set up a Google adwords account. I threw together a simple campaign just to get the hang of how it works and gave Google a budget of $20 to play with for a week. I will watch results and correlate what I see with what I learn. When the $20 runs out I will then have a much better idea of what I am doing and how to proceed. This pay-per-click is quite a lot more complex than it appears at first glance and I am in fully-fledged study mode.

However, the problems arose when I attempted to do the same for the Yahoo and Microsoft/MSN/Bing system. Yahoo has some superb tutorial flash presentations and its site is slick and works well. I especially liked the on-line calculator where I could experiment with the estimated clicks and impressions when I chose different monthly campaign budgets and different keyword bids. This calculator is great. However, the downer came right at the end, after I had set up an entire campaign for a particular targeted product page. They wanted me to sign up for a monthly amount which would be debited each month from my credit card by them. Now, sorrrreeeee, I don’t allow anyone to automatically debit my card. (Fingers burnt too many times). To crown it all, there was no reassuring paragraph or link telling me how I could stop this automatic debit. So, I abandoned Yahoo just in time before giving them my credit card detail.

Then I went across to Microsoft’s ad centre and found I could easily sign up using my MSN account that I have had for years and is used when windows messenger. is used That was a good start. Unfortunately it was downhill from then on. After requiring that an entire advert be crafted before even activating the account, they then wanted a monthly budget in Swedish Kronen. Sorry, not my currency or country. But no apparent way to change it. OK, back-browse, I might have missed something. But while going backwards I realized that I’d better copy/paste all the details of the advert and keywords that I’d created, so as not to have to do it all again. No chance. It wouldn’t allow me to. (No, I wasn’t using my usual Firefox on Microsoft’s site - I was using IE8.) I eventually went all the way back to the beginning and started again, but nowhere did it allow me to change the currency of the monthly budget. What a half-baked unfinished excuse for a system! Do they actually want to make money through this? No wonder Google is coining it hand over fist!  Eventually, I gave up. I still don’t know if Microsoft Ad centre wants to automatically debit my credit card, but when they murmur about a monthly budget without any further information, I get nervous and bail out.

I’ll maybe go back to them once I have cut my teeth on Google’s system. At least these guys seem to have thought it out properly - but wow - what an incredible amount of documentation to wade through, though…