I had hit a bit of a stumbling block with my A4U competition site, I had the design in place, I had a decent chunk of writing, but I had no products! Luckily I was accepted to F Hinds programme yesterday so last night I spent an hour selecting the products I wanted from their feed and adding them to wordpress. For now I had copied the feed descriptions in, but these will all be rewritten at some point.
I had previously written a script which checks product prices by scraping the web pages (ideal for sites without feeds!), however as most of the jewellery merchants have feeds I figured I may as well use them so started writing a script for that. So far it reads the in the feed file from AWin, unzip’s it and updates all the prices for the products in wordpress with the new prices. When I get a spare few minutes I will put a little bit of code in which will check the feed for any products with the word “gold” and “locket” in, if it finds any emails me the details for me to add them to wordpress.
One problem I have at the minute is that one of the categories on the site is price. If a locket changes from say £55 to £45, it would need to change the category it is in. Now I can code this so that when it updates the price it updates the categories table as well, but it would be easier if I could create a custom page which rather than showing all the products in a certain category, shows all products with a price custom field value of between £x and £y. If anyone knows a way of doing that it would be much appreciated.
I have also got quite a long list of longtail keywords which I will be trying to cram into product descriptions and write a few blog posts for. Im still confident that I’ll get the whole site built from scratch, including adding all the products, writing quite a bit of content and a little bit of link building in under 10 hours. Im trying to get to the point where I can knock a site like this out in a day including some basic offsite SEO. I know people that are outputting a handful in a day, but I like to create custom themes for each and every site and write decent unique content for it.
A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Total Time Spent: 4 Hours
A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Earnings: £0.00