I mentioned earlier this week that I was adding lots of content to our leaving cert tips site. We are getting the site ready for a relaunch very soon and it's coming together nicely.

photo credit: jurvetson

Summer time is a great time for us to be working on the site as the traffic is down after the current cohort of leaving certers have finished up and are actively seeking college places for 2011.

It's much easier working on a site with someone else than on your own as ideas fly about a lot faster and work gets completed much quicker. I'm working on a pretty monotonous task and Sean is working on the creative stuff. When it all comes together the creativity and new design will merge well with the new content to make the site much stringer going into the new school year.

This will be our first year in charge of leaving-cert.net and we are currently seeking student bloggers and getting some really good applications so far.

Two heads are definitely better than one and it doesn't really matter who is doing what as long as everyone is contributing to the value of the site. That's the thing about online partnerships, it's just much easier than working on something by yourself.

I mentioned that I had two new sites going live yesterday in my previous post. You'll see I've added 125x125 image links to both sites at the top of my sidebar so go and have a look. I've teamed up with Sean at Smemon.com for both these projects and you can see what Sean wrote about them here.

So both sites are now live. We agree that they both need work over the next few weeks and in the long term and we're pretty open to how each project develops over time. Obviously there is a good bit of work running 3 different blog sites so eventually we'd like to open at least one of these sites up as a community based site if we get enough visitors. Here's a bit more about each of the new websites.

TopCommentator.com: If you've been reading my blog, you'll know that I've had this idea for a while. Sean designed the logo for topcommentator.com and I asked him to team up on the project as two heads are better than one (he also designed the logo for lucky.ie, I think they both look very well). TopCommentator.com will be used to comment on top blogs on the internet in the hope that we gain traffic back to our own site. We need to be careful with this one so we're not seen as spammers but the idea is more to have a useful base to use as a blog reading platform.

We're both reading these blogs anyway so we'll be provided comments that promote discussion on other sites and hopefully we'll be seen as adding value to these sites as contributors as opposed to just commenting for the sake of a link back to topcommentator.com. There won't be any "nice post" or "good idea" comments coming from us!

Lucky.ie: This idea came about as a result of discussing Betfair and domain names at the same time. Lucky.ie is a site we're myself and Sean compete against each other each month to see who can win/loose the least as online gamblers.

This site will be the easiest of all to run as we'll basically be detailing every online bet that we place .As it's a competition, we'll both be trying hard to out do each other with plenty of bets, so content for this site shouldn't be a problem. In the first day alone, we've had 5 posts, so you can see the benefits of partnering up on a site already if you're trying to develop content for a website. We're probably not going to win or loose a fortune, but it'll be great fun running this site!

There's a couple of other sites that we're talking about teaming up, so hopefully you'll see me adding some more sites to my portfolio before the end of the Summer.

I'm involved in two new websites that are launching on Saturday. I've mentioned TopCommentator.com earlier this week and the other site is a .ie website aimed targeting Irish readers although we'll be happy to get as many international visitors as we can to the site also. I've teamed up with Sean at Smemon.com on both these projects and he's wrote a little bit more about the .ie project here.

photo credit: TopTechWriter.US

I suppose with TopCommentator.com, I've been mentioning it for a while and it's probably not the best move in the world to be mentioning a site that isn't live yet. But we've agreed that this is a long term project and we can develop the look of the site over time. For the launch on Saturday we just need enough content on the site to establish the idea behind it before getting down to a bit of work to move the site onwards. The general idea is to get traffic for the site but we'll be approaching it slowly and letting the traffic grow naturally over time. We're hoping that we can produce stats on this project that are valuable to others that are looking to build traffic for their own websites.

For the .ie project, this is very much a fun project where myself and Sean will be competing against each other online and blogging about our experiences. With this one, again we want to establish the site over time and we're open to the idea of getting more people involved as the site grows, with a view to eventually making this a community based site. I'll be updating this blog with a link to the .ie site on Saturday, and you can keep checking back on both it and TopCommentator.com to track our progress.

photo credit: Will Lion

I had it in my mind at the beginning of the Summer that I'd have at least 3 established websites by the end of the Summer. With Rudevid.com, TopCommentator.com and the .ie project I've already achieved this. All these sites as well as my blog will only get better over time but I'm slowly building a small portfolio of sites, so this blog is working well for me as a control centre for running my projects from. There's at least 2 more sites that I'll have up and running before the end of the Summer, so there will a good bit of work maintaining all these sites. If I keep working at all of them and get each project whipped into shape then I'll be learning new things all the time and hopefully I'll be producing better and better sites as time goes on.

I've mentioned top commentator before, it's going to be a website that acts as a control centre for commenting on other blogs of interest. It's easy to get carried away reading blogs and as it's something I do anyway, I thought I may as well try and get some links back to the top commentator site by dropping a comment or two when I'm reading other people's blog.

photo credit: premasagar

Anyway, this one has been on the back burner for too long. If you check out the sidebar on the right hand side you'll see a countdown timer indicating that TopCommentator.com should be launching in about 5 days times. Well I've started work on this site today and plan on completing it ahead of schedule. The main objective of this project is to use the site as a base for commenting on other blogs and it's essential to complete the site and get working on this sooner rather than later. The design of the site and ideas for the content we develop can evolve over time, but for now the main thing is to get it out there and see how the project kicks off! I'd normally be hesistant to go public with a site without having much content up on it but for this one we'll be sticking around on other peoples blogs for a while so I'm sure they'll keep coming back to the site every now and again to have another look anyway!

I've teamed up with Sean MacEntee on this project and we're taking the launch date forward to the 1st of August. That leaves us kicking off on a new month with zero visits and we'll be updating the site with monthly stats to check the progress. So check out TopCommentator.com later this week to see how it looks.

I made a to do list at the start of this week and here's a progress report:

photo credit: nocas