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Over the weekend Steve has been resurrecting one of our old adult sites that still gets quite a reasonable amount of traffic. We're not quite sure how it manages to do that because it hasn't been updated in over a year but it does and that traffic was even going on to some of our sponsors in quite impressive numbers so it was time for a makeover.

Because the amount of time we have to spend on a site like that is really limited we decided to convert most of it into a TGP that only listed free hosted galleries. We drop those into a text file and then call the file onto the page through a php script that randomly selects a set number each time the page is viewed.

It's the perfect solution for those of us who don't have a great deal of time to devote to a site ... or are too lazy to put more effort into their attempts at making money. While we could have chosen to be totally lazy and just have each gallery appear on the site as ‘Gallery' we prefer to have the listings show up with a short description so the first galleries we went looking for were sponsor galleries with short descriptions.

There are certainly plenty of those around so we didn't really have to look too far and dropping them into a text file with pipe delimiters was just too easy and there is a trap for all of us to fall into.

It was easy ... very easy ... too easy as I just said. All we had to do was go to the sponsor's site, find the listing, highlight, copy, paste into the text file and upload. That was it - the galleries were appearing with the descriptions and all it took was less than five minutes work for each category.

So the job was done and we could go on to other things. Well, that's what we thought but we still decided to take a quick look at the way the gallery listings were appearing on the site and that's when we began to notice problems.

First we looked at the descriptions and realized that one set of descriptions released recently by a major sponsor were rather poor. In fact some were so poor that many of the descriptions didn't make any sense. Some appeared to have been cut off in mid-sentence while others were very repetitive and not terribly interesting either.

So we sat down and rewrote them. Not only were we able to condense them into just five words but we were able to make them much attractive to the surfers who were hitting our site.

Then we decided to click on some of those links and have a look at the galleries the sponsor was providing. This time we were quite impressed until we clicked on a few thumbnails. Instead of seeing the corresponding big picture we kept seeing the same images over and over again and none of them came from the galleries that we were showing the surfers.

So our quick fix for an old site has become something of a longer fix because we took the time to check what the surfer was going to see. In this busy world where the rush is to produce more so that you can make more money do you ever stop and check what sponsors are giving you to use? Do you ever stop and read some of the descriptions that come with the free hosted galleries? Do you ever click on any of the thumbnails to see if they really do lead to the correct big picture?

Or do you just take what you're given and throw it up on your site in the hope that something will stick with the surfers and you'll make some money for very little effort?

Maybe I'm being perverse here, perhaps that's all it takes in this industry to make money. Perhaps we still live back in the golden ages where a semi-hardcore banner was all it took to make more money than you had ever dreamed of. Perhaps we're all just too lazy for our own good.

What if you did take time to ensure that the gallery descriptions really did make sense? What if you did take the time to check all the links to ensure that you had at least some hope of making money from a free hosted gallery? What if your surfers ... you know, those people that you want to actually buy something so that you can make money ... recognized your site as one that delivered quality and was worth coming back to again and again?

Yes, I know what you're thinking. Why should anyone bother doing that when you can throw up the galleries each week and then rush on to the next money-making project that you're working on?

Perhaps the answer is that you should be taking the time to ensure some quality in what appears on your sites because that's one way of making even more money. It's a strange thought I know but play with it for a little while and maybe you'll see some value in it.