About the site
In June 1995 I finally got the chance to combine my interest in travelling with my occupation as a cellular engineer. After spending a year in Beijing I came back to Europe, arriving here on June 21st 1996. I freely admit that I knew nothing of Prague other than it had a reputation for being a beautiful city. It did not look beautiful as I was being driven over the cobblestoned road outside Sparta stadium in the pouring rain that day. I stayed in Prague a little over a year before leaving on another contract. I returned six months later to buy a house and have lived here since December 1997. Sona and I now have three children and although I continue to work in other countries, Prague is now my home. To those of you who know me from working in Prague and are familiar with the Praha City Center building, you might like to see a photograph of what it looked like on August 14th 2002 at the height of the flooding.
.... you've done a lot of work here .... 
Website Past History
In the year 2000 I first made a webpage on geocities.com using templates but, it never got any further than basic info. In 2001 I spent some time on virtualtourist.com which at the time allowed basic HTML programming to make the page more individual. As well as learning basic commands I took "Antony's HTML course" and that filled in the gaps. As I looked around for basic information on Prague I was disappointed to find no website actually gave you practical "how to..." information and certainly nobody was telling you how the ticket machines worked or how to use the "Park and Ride" etc. In February 2002 I published three pages using classic "3-section" html code (top heading and side link bars with a separate main content area), the first was the "index" page, the second was "How to Eat Czech Food" and the third was "Getting Around". In October 2002 the site was converted to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which is recommended if a site goes over 20 pages or is likely to grow (CSS basically allows you to make changes to a single file which will affect text and colour on all site pages that reference that file). In January 2003 I introduced PayPal onto the site as a means of off-setting the majority of the running costs. Later I registered my own personal domain and continued to run the site from there. From the original 3 pages it had now grown to about 50, many of which had info not on any guide printed or online. In July 2004 I started a major reconstruction of the site to reorganise it to include extra pages and began the preparation of the new look. In 2008 came the second major reconstruction as I dumped by old javascript templates in favour of a simple xhtml design that allows for mobiles to view the pages with no problems.
Making Money "nuts and bolts"
So how do you make money from a non-commercial website. Let me pass on my experience as a "small earner":
I am not a Prague Hotel booking service, I don't rent cars, book tickets or arrange tours etc but I continually try to generate revenue where possible. Here are the popular ways I've found and their pros and cons:
ADVERTS
I introduced "Google ads" onto the site in June 2006. Not all pages have them. Initially, three or four types of adverts existed but, I played around with different sizes/formats for boxed, unboxed, buttons and text adverts before finally settling on the smaller "2 ad" and the "button ad" on most of the site. I've never seen any image ads running (I think text ads must be more cost effective). As the monthly "unique visitor" rate went over 5000 and my Google page rank increased I was being approached by companies about advertising on the site but, I felt it was difficult to control. Google offered an opportunity to get reasonably targeted adverts onto the site with no hassles for me so I've decided to try it out. Pro - once setup it runs in the background and Google can pay direct to your bank. Con - You cannot promote the ads and the ad click percentage normally hovers around 3% so you must have at least 5000 unique visitors a month to get to the U$100 mark whereby you get a payment.
SPECULATE TO ACCUMULATE
Take a look at Google Adwords. The deal is that you increase for site's listing position by bidding on keywords. The idea is that you pay, for example, 5 cents for each "pay per click" and a person who arrives at your site through this method generates more revenue for you whilst they are on your site. Work out your budget and the search criteria that will bring more people per click to your site for the least amount of cost to you. Choose the time of day when you want your site to appear in the list i.e. if you are targeting the UK market then you want to know when most people are visiting your site i.e. links displayed at 3am in the morning in the UK don't often get clicked on. Always go for "pay per click" and not "pay per view".
LINKING
A site pays you to link to them from one or more pages. PRO - easy to setup. CON - fixed payment rate based on the number of pages you link from and if you don't generate enough traffic on the link the deal will end. CON - bigger companies may not find it cost effective to pay you little money, smaller companies may not honour the deal so it's best to get it paid up-front.
SELLING
No matter what you sell the bottom line is "how do you get paid?". I setup a PayPal account early on. They charge a fairly high percentage for their service but, for a non-business user it's one of the few options. PRO - Information based products are easier to sell for a profit and there's a certain degree of consumer protection. CON - occasional bad customer but, I guess it comes with the territory so don't commit too much.
DONATIONS
If only it were that simple. I tried the PayPal "donation" buttons for a year and got a grand total of U$5. I'm much more likely to get a customer who pays U$25 for something I sell for U$20 because they liked my site and it saved them time and money so, they add a bit more.
AFFILIATIONS
In May 2006 I decided to take a look at affiliations. I'd read quite a bit about the pros and cons of this i.e. you have to do all the promotion and then trust the affiliated company that it will pay you correctly but, a lot of hard work has gone into the site and I wanted to see what I could do to enhance the content. By February 2008 my list of affiliations numbered 3. I'm a bit choosy I guess. I first linked to Amazon on my guidebook page but in almost two years only one person ever bought a book through my page (according to the stats). So that leaves the main two that run from the accommodation section of the site. Firstly, I affiliate with Trip Advisor (again, every now and then I get a cheque in the post). I was familiar with the site and found it to be a useful resource for impartial descriptions of the hotel to back up my own assessment. I've reduced this based on their payment system i.e. cheque. I now look only at "direct payment" options. Secondly I affiliate with a local company in Prague for hotel booking services because they've been around for a while and offer a reliable service. I'm currently checking out another two options one for a hotel booking service and a second for flights. Both will work using a search form and not just a banner. I found that there are two tracking options 1) current session and 2) timed cookie. The deal with "current session" is that if they go through my site to the affiliate and buy things or click on adverts then I get a share of that revenue. "Timed cookie" works in more or less the same way but for example if a visitor turns off their PC and the next day goes back to the affiliate site directly i.e. not through my site then the cookie will show that they originally arrived via my site. In plain English "cookie affiliates earn more money". PRO - share of any revenue but, check the percentage. PRO - runs in the background. PRO - up to you how much you promote the link. CON - payment by bank transfer is best but, not everybody offers it i.e. some like Trip Advisor insist on paying by cheque which can cost a lot to cash. CON - as with all affiliations and adverts, your visitor will be leaving your site when they click on the link.
Other Add-ons
STATISTICS
In December 2006 I ditched my old statistics webpage (formerly Nedstat, it was bought out by webstats4u) when "pop ups" started appearing. I hate pop ups so, at a visit count of 142,447 and a monthly hit rate at 3000+ I removed the stats code from Nedstat and put in the Google Analytics code instead. I've been very impressed by what information you can get even as a non-adword using webpage.
BLOG
I toyed with this a few times but, never really found it fitted in with my life. If you want to record your daily life and inflict it on others then I suggest you make it interesting.
GUEST BOOK
Twice I used guestbooks as a way of allowing people who viewed my site to leave a message. Twice I removed them because of serious abuse by individuals about whom I have no clue as to why they get a kick out of printing personal insults. I didn't start the site to read insulting crap so, as an add-on I decided to do without it.
FACEBOOK
Almost the same as a blog but, it combined a bit more media with the ability to control and participate in discussions. I started developing my Facebook page in 2010.
Small Screen
October 2008 saw the launch of my mobile version. Strictly text with a few pictures here and there. Fast loading and designed for use on mobiles, smartphones and PDAs. You can see it at Livingprague.mobi
Technical Advice
My HTML skills are self taught. Previous templates were bought because my HTML skills reached a point where I was able to edit source code to meet my requirements. Below you'll find some of the sites that took a while for me to find and that helped me out on the journey. In order of importance to me;
www.dynamicdeezign.com. This was where I found the tutorials for Antony's HTML and CSS. It was my introduction to HTML.
www.vbexplorer.com. An Internet 101 tutorial.
www.javascriptkit.com. A resource for Javascripts. This site was peppered with javascripts that are pre-built or added by me to enhance it. The search engine is javascript based as is bookmarking and moving page title text. My own domain has many different tools and calculators that I use for my work. This site showed me how they work. I don't use them much now as they seem very dependant on browser code.
selfpromotion.com. A humourous but, effective site that showed me the tips and tricks for promoting the site content and search engine registration techniques.
www.sitesell.com/sbi2028.html. Another humourous and incredibly positive site (if a bit in your face) but, I found the free MYSS pdf which has helped me develop marketing techniques on how best to draw visitors to the site. I don't sell much yet but, the time will come when this knowledge will come in very handy.
www.xml-sitemaps.com. A site that produced my sitemap in XML format (for free) for upload to Google. It also produces a URL list for use with Yahoo plus other useful webmaster stuff.
www.cutepdf.com. This was where I found the CutePDF3.0 word/text to .pdf conversion freeware. All .pdf documents on this site were created using this program.
www.tipue.com/endsheet. The location of the Endsheet freeware program to index website pages for creating a search file that forms the basis of a local site search facility. I've since switched to Google Search and tweeked it to search my site as default.
www.coffeecup.com. Free Image map generator. Say you are looking at an online map and on that map is a hotel. When you move your mouse around the map, you find that when it moves over the hotel the mouse changes because it detects a link. The map may have many hotels and each one can have it's own link assigned by using an Image Map.
www.ornj.net. Location of the Album generator Freeware program. Edited code to suit my requirement but, all photo albums on the site were built using this program.
www.download.com. Location of various programs including CoreFTP Freeware which I use for File Transfers that keep the site updated.
www.google.com. Once you have a Google account you can apply for Google Analytics which is their kick-ass free statistics offer. Stats based on content and marketing. Very useful for small commercial sites venturing into the "adwords" area of Google. You can just hear the old "free stats" sites crying and there's not even any pop-ups. Their webmaster tools are pretty good as well.
