Happy Thanksgiving! – New Monetization Features Added to The Net Fool

I wanted to spit out a quick post today…
wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is a harvest festival, which (according to legend) originated in the America’s when the Native Americans and Pilgrims met for a feast.

Wikipedia states: “The dates and whereabouts of the first Thanksgiving celebration are a topic of modest contention. Though the earliest attested Thanksgiving celebration was on September 8, 1565 in what is now Saint Augustine, Florida, the traditional ‘first Thanksgiving’ is venerated as having occurred at the site of Plymouth Plantation, in 1621.”

So there you have it. From what I’ve seen, this holiday exists in the United States and in Canada… though others might celebrate for the heck of it. In all, it’s a nice excuse to get off from work and spend some quality time with the family.

New Features Added to The Net Fool

I took the free time I had last night to work a few hours on my header… adding a nice “money makers” section. Why did it take so long? Well, the header on my blog is not hard-coded as HTML… the image is layered with the programming language “CSS.” I was not at all used to using an image map to link certain areas of an image without my dear old HTML basic knowledge… so I had to learn how to do it through CSS (which is actually very possible).

I believe that spending 3 hours doing this is no problem, because if I get even one sale off of any of the new links I threw up top, I will have made it all back. My design before had a huge dead area there, which was honestly concerning me for some time. Now that I have some real monetization in the header, I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw a considerable jump in monthly revenue. You saw John Cow switch out of his old layout in a massive turnaround… but I felt that such a drastic change would have been a bit sudden, and I’d much rather “phase in” new monetization techniques naturally.

So what do you guys think? I’d love to know what you link/don’t like about the new header design. In addition to the links on the right side, my logo is now clickable. I feel like having your logo clickable is a no-brainer… but I was simply too inexperienced with CSS coding to know that I could actually make it work.

I want to give a brief shout-out to A List Apart, and their great article “Night of the Image Map” which helped me through the process… great stuff! It’s awesome what you can dig up on your own by searching Google nowadays.

Happy Thanksgiving!
-The Net Fool