You will have read in our last newsletter that CBD-Search has been struggling for a while now.

We are still struggling along, but are hoping and praying that we will soon see the other end of this tunnel. Again, this message is to warn you, our loyal partners, so that you are aware of our situation before making any purchases at our website. You are of course more than welcome to purchase additional advertising to help us during this time if you like.

We have received a number of offers to purchase this site, but unfortunately we have not yet been able to reply to you all because of ongoing computer difficulties. Selling is not really an option as doing so would not really help us, and would certainly not help the continuation of our other products and services, and would certainly no where near pay all the time and effort that has been put into this site so far. At this time, if we do need to close down, we will probably choose to suspend service until we come across better times.

Thank you again for your ongoing support and for the words of encouragement received from some of you.

Kind regards and God Bless,

Hayden Andrews
CBD-Search

CBD-Search, along with our other projects, have been struggling for a while now.

We have put a lot of time in to developing a suite of Internet technologies (not yet ready for release), but due to an unprecedented number of personal situations and attacks over the last year or so, we may soon end up shutting down all of our Internet projects.

We want to delay this as long as we can, in expectation of God's intervention and blessing, but we wanted to warn those of you who may be thinking of paying for extra advertising at CBD-Search, or renewing existing subscriptions, as it is possible that we may not be around for the whole period of your subscription.

There is an exciting possibility of us partnering with a local Thai company with regard to the main bulk of our work, and we are currently pursuing this opportunity. Whether this comes about before circumstances require us to shut down our existing projects is another question though.

As always, thanks so much for all of your support and encouragement. May God bless you richly as you serve him and commit all you do to Him.

Hayden Andrews
CBD-Search

The hosting solution that has helped make CBD-Search so successful is now available to the general public.

After two years in business, operating with a small number of clients (under a dozen), HeyDan Development has decided to make their hosting solution available to the public.

The costs are incredibly low and the flexibility in what is available is amazing. Although they provide a range of products to their existing customers, products will only be made available through their new web interface as the interface is extended and developed, but a friendly message could produce any number of positive results.

Since the web interface is not fully developed and automated, and since making online payments is not yet possible, HeyDan Development are looking for a number of 'good' customers to help extend their existing business as easily as possible.

Create a user ID at www.HeyDan.org, login, select your preferred currency, and explore to see what is available to you.

Things have been quiet at CBD-Search for quite some time now. Yet still, we continue to increase in popularity on the Internet with both the number of submissions to our database and with the number of hits we receive each day.

We stopped development on the CBD-Search website, and temporarily suspended our newsletters, because of difficult times and family issues, which required a substantial shift in priorities.

Although the day-to-day running of the CBD-Search website has not been affected, we have not been able to send out the monthly newsletter for quite some time, and we have quite a backlog of site submissions waiting approval.

We hope to be able to catch up over the next few weeks, and to also restart our newsletter (probably bi-monthly for the next while). Please accept our apology for the time taken to process your submissions and to answer your emails. We hope to get back to you soon.

Also, as always: Thanks so much for your ongoing support of our website.

Hayden Andrews
CBD-Search

As you will know, at CBD-Search, we constantly aim to serve the Christian community for free.

Although we are constantly in need of finances to support this site, we are greatly pleased by the number of advertisers who have been able to use our services to maximum effect without having to spend anything but reward credit.

Although we would like everything at CBD-Search to be free, we also have a credit system for 2 reasons:

1. To suit those who want to pay for extra advertising.
2. To suit those who want to earn reward credit through CBD-Search to spend on additional advertising.

You will also be aware that we have been recommending that displaying additional graphical and textual adverts at CBD-Search is a great way of using your credit.

So how do you get reward credit? ...

1. When you submit a new resource to CBD-Search, you receive $5 bonus credit.
2. Each time that we reverify your resource, if we find a link to CBD-Search on your main page, we will gift you additional credit depending on how prominent the link is and how many legit hits we have received from your site in the past months.
3. You can also display the graphical adverts of other CBD-Search advertisers to receive a portion of the cost to them.

To find out how much credit you currently have on your account, please login at CBD-Search. Then please help us help you by going to 'My Resources' and submitting graphical and textual banner adverts to further increase the hits you receive from us.

We do have plans for automating the reward credit process, and for introducing more free services, and for further focussing on our goals :) But these changes all take time, so in the meantime, although we love the fact that some of you are able to make the most of our services for free, please remember that we do especially appreciate those of you who pay real money for additional services or sponsor us by donation.

Many CBD-Search advertisers would like to list multiple pages in the CBD-Search directory.

Our policy, however, is to only include 1 page from each site, and that page is normally the main page of the site.

There is a very easy way to get around this though. We have a banner system which allows you to upload as many graphics (we have 2 acceptable sizes) as you like, each pointing to any page any where on the Internet. You can also create text adverts which can also point to any page any where on the Internet.

There is a small price for displaying these graphical and text adverts, but the price is so minimal that the $5 free credit, received for submitting a new resource, can allow these adverts to run for quite some time. There are also those who have links to us from their main pages, for which we sometimes credit an additional $5 in thanks. Some such advertisers have ended up running multiple graphical/text adverts on CBD-Search at no cost.

For further information, login at CBD-Search, and go to 'My Resources'. From this page, there is a link to the banner configuration for each of your resources, where you can then submit multiple banners.

We are sometimes asked how many Hits CBD-Search gets per day. This is always such a hard question to answer as noone can agree what a hit is or how they should be counted.

We take a very harsh view on calculating visits/hits so that the statistics we gather may be useful to us rather than trying to maximise numbers. We use the following guidlines to ascertain how many visitors we receive per day:

• We consider requests from spiders, and requests that result in HTTP status/error codes, as seperate from real hits and do not include them in the numbers we quote.
• A 'visit' is counted when a browser is sent at least 2 CBD-Search pages after having not sent that browser any pages for a period of at least 12 hours.

This means that:

• Someone viewing one CBD-Search web page and then not viewing another page within a 12 hour period is not counted as a visit. This lowers our statistics dramatically, but is more honest as it ignores accidental and not-interested visits.
• Someone visiting a CBD-Search webpage exactly once every 6 hours for 120 hours is counted as 1 visit (on the day of the first page view) of 20 page views. This means that any visits from spiders that we have not yet categorised as being a spider is minimalised due to their frequent page hits.
• Someone visiting 2 CBD-Search webpages at the same time every day is counted as 1 visit each day of 2 page hits. We consider this to be 'normal usage', and this is the type of visitor that we are trying to count.

The explanation given, we can now say that currently (June 2008) we regularly receive 300-400 visits per day (infrequently 250-600) which is an increase of 100 over 6 months ago, and double what we received a year ago.

Some of you may have noticed that the CBD-Search website has slowed down quite considerably lately. This is due to the site's steadily increasing popularity finally reaching a level that our poor little server can't cope with.

Over the next few days, we hope to migrate our database to a fresh server, and we have plans in the future to implement our new templating system which will result in CBD-Search web pages loading much quicker with alot less stress on our database server.

Thank you, as always, for your continued support :)

Just a quick note to welcome and thank this years Site Sponsors. We hope you will benefit from the relationship over the next year.

If you missed out on this years auction, then you can register your interest in next years auction and we will send you a reminder when it starts. To do so, log in at www.CBD-Search.com and select 'Partner Opportunities'.

One thing that we have noticed at CBD-Search, while processing new submissions, is that there are a lot of churches without any form of location details on their website.

Many websites don't need to list an obvious address, but for websites that exist to promote a specific location (e.g. bookshops, churches, local councils), surely it is counter-productive to not include an address.

We have also noticed, in some cases, that some church websites do not even mention the city or state that they are located in. The only use we can see for these particular sites is that the church is wanting to have a website that only their own members know about. This is difficult to believe though as some of these websites have been expertly designed and are surely intended for more than this.

In many cases, the name of the church's town is part of the name of the church (e.g. Mytown Baptist Church), but once again, that town could be in any state of most any country on earth....

You may respond that people can always use the site's contact-us form to find the church's specific details, but I would then respond that if I was looking for churches available in my town (or a town that I intend to visit), I would not be very likely to contact all of these sites (and there seems to be a huge number of church sites that do not include location details) just to find if they are located in my country or not.

I would suggest that this must be a common oversight, and that if you have a church site that does not clearly state where the church is located, that you should have the site updated.

I understand that there are good reasons why people prefer to not include an exact address on a website, but any church website should certainly include helpful details like the suburb, town, state and country. Yes, you should certainly include your country! Do not expect that everyone in the world knows the state-names for your country. I certainly don't remember which 2 letter state abbreviations come from USA and which come from Canada.

Again, you may tell me that if I were to live in the USA or Canada, I would know all these abbreviations, but again I reply that the Internet is an international medium and as someone who likes to visit churches when I occasionally travel to other countries, I often use the Internet to find a church to visit.

As a final thought, because your website is advertising a specific location, a very effective way of increasing your searchability on the Internet based on your location, is to include your address at the bottom of each page of your site, even if it is just your suburb, town, state and country. For American churches, I would even include your full state name, as well as the abbreviation, to guarantee searchability by state.

I hope that this article helps, but as always, you are welcome to leave your own comments.

 

There are a number of people who support us in various ways, from just making use of our services through to making donations to help with the development of CBD-Search and associated projects.

It is often difficult to know how to respond to people's generosity, some feeling appreciated by being recognised, while others prefer to remain as anonymous as possible.

We do have pages at CBD-Search dedicated to listing our current sponsors and partner sites as well as those supporters who have made donations. This is not enough to show our appreciation of all those who have supported us though, and does not include those of you who support us in pray or by purchasing extra services from the CBD-Search website. So I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your continued support.

Your support has allowed CBD-Search to continue running and slowly expand for some years now. It has not always been easy, and although the site is now paying for it's hosting and other costs, it does not yet pay for any development/admin time.

We are currently working on new services (time allowing) aimed to help the Christian presence on the Internet, but we also dream of my work on these projects to start paying for the development time so that we can be released more into ministry work here in Thailand.

Thank you once again for your support, and know that never once does a purchase or donation go un-noticed. We remain grateful as always....

Hayden & Emily Andrews
Christian Business and Information Directory
www.CBD-Search.com

The third annual CBD-Search sponsorship auction is now upon us. This is your chance to become a sponsor and to enjoy the sponsorship benefits, at a price that suits you.

For those who have been asking, to find out more information, or to place a bid:

1. Login at CBD-Search.
2. Select 'Partner Opportunities' from the menu on the left.
3. In the 'Site Sponsors' box, you can enter bids for your resource(s).

If you have multiple resources listed with us, you are more than welcome to submit bids for each resource under your control.

Many thanks, as always, to all of you who support us in various ways.

God bless,

Hayden Andrews
Christian Business and Information Directory
www.CBD-Search.com

CBD-Search's 3rd annual sponsorship auction will be held from April 1st - 21st. This is a great opportunity to have your graphical banners included on our outgoing emails as well as throughout our site, for a price that you are happy with. Please don't miss this exciting opportunity to become one of this year's CBD-Search Sponsors.

If you are a current CBD-Search advertiser with existing graphical banners, then you should certainly consider this option as a more effective method of advertising with our site. Among other benefits, our sponsors will have their graphical adverts displayed more often on our site as well as included in all our out-going HTML emails.

We are currently serving well over 100,000 pages per month (over 3 times more than this time last year), and send out at least 1,300 HTML emails per month.

The sponsorship advertising component of these pages and emails will be shared proportionally among our [up to 10] sponsors based on the value of their final bids. Of course, how successful each sponsor's adverts are depends on the appeal of the advert itself, with this years sponsors receiving between 3% - 6% click through depending on the appeal of their adverts.

As in the past, only the top 10 bids will be accepted as this coming year's sponsors, and will receive all our sponsorship benefits, shared proportionally based on the values of the final winning bids. It is therefore possible for eager bidders to take a larger slice of the sponsorship pie, making higher bids quite effective and beneficial.

Also remaining unchanged, our sponsors are able to upload as many graphical adverts as they like, changing, adding and deleting banners throughout the year. These graphical adverts will also be included in our normal pay-per-display banner advert program (although this may be limited by the sponsor).

Sponsors will have their graphical adverts displayed more often at the top of each page on our site, and every page will include a smaller graphical link to one of our Sponsors (located prominently in the menu). Also, all of our out-going HTML emails include links to at least one of our Sponsors, chosen proportionally based on the value of the final bids.

Again, this is an opportunity not to be missed! Please have a look today and choose to Sponsor this up-and-coming website.

To find out more, login to CBD-Search and click on 'Partnership Opportunities' in the menu.

Thank you for your continued support. We pray that we will always be a blessing and encouragement to each other.

 

 

I can see that quite a few people have been writing articles for inclusion in the CBD-Search newsletter, but very few of you have submitted them for approval and inclusion.

Here are some notes on writing articles to be included in the CBD-Search newsletter and Blogs:

• Make sure that you submit your article as the correct 'type'. If your article is not relevant for the selected category/type, your article will be rejected.
• There are some rules for articles submitted to the various categories/types, which include:
  • Resource News Articles - Use this article type to tell the world about your latest product or service or any other news relating to your resource. Please do not include any personal/contact details as a safe link to your CBD-Search resource will be automatically included, leading perusers to your web-site and a safe 'Contact Us' form (if you have allowed email contact for the resource).
  • Thoughts Regarding God and Life - Use this article type for insightful views regarding some aspect of God or/and life. We will not accept any articles with links to resource sites (apart from references), or any form of advertising.
  • Site Reviews - If you are logged in to CBD-Search and are viewing the resource listings, you will see an option to submit a review for any particular resource. You may not submit a review of any resource that you own, or have a business relationship with (use Resource News Articles in this case).

• Make sure that you have enough credit in your account to cover the minimal cost of the article. A portion of the submission cost is an admin fee which can not be returned if your article is rejected, so please make sure that your article meets all relevant criteria.
• Please do not copy MS-Word documents, or other poorly formed HTML documents, into your article. You should be able to copy and paste the text (without formatting) and then use our article submission form to add basic formatting.
• On the article submission form, there is a button to save the current state of your article, which you should use often, and another button to submit your article (if you have sufficient credit) to be approved for inclusion in the next 2 CBD-Search newsletters. Don't forget to submit your article, once completed, or else it will never be included in the newsletter.
• On the main 'User Articles' screen, you will see your current (and recently submitted) articles. A status of 'Not Submitted' means that you need to go in to the article and submit it for approval. A status of 'Submitted' means that it is currently being reviewed. 'Live' means that the article has been approved and included.

I hope that this helps those of you with articles in various stages of completion. For those of you who have not looked at 'User Articles' yet, you should login to CBD-Search, click on 'User Articles' and have a look. This is a very cheap way of contacting and advertising to the Christian community at CBD-Search.

 

Many thanks to those of you who keep your CBD-Search resource(s) up to date as your details change.

We welcome you, if any details of your resource(s) change, to login to CBD-Search, go to 'My Resources', and update the details.

Apart from the usual checks and changes we make to ensure that data remains as true as possible and adheres to our standard formats, there is only one caveat regarding updating your resources ...

" When you update your resource's details, the new details must continue to represent the original resource. "

You are welcome to change the name of your resource, or the web-site address (URL) if these have changed for your resource, but if you edit these details to point to a completely different resource, your update will be rejected.

If you would like to submit a new resource, you will find an option to do so when you login at CBD-Search.

If you would like to delete an existing resource from CBD-Search, you can do so by going to 'My Resources' and then selecting 'Delete Resource'.