The "Mistakes" Thread

Engineer

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Hi everyone,

I thought it might be interesting (and entertaining) to have an ongoing thread where we can talk about the mistakes we've made as webmasters.

I'll start.... Yesterday I discovered such a stupid thing -- I'm still kicking myself for this.

A few months ago, I placed Google Analytics on several of my sites. For the last few months, I've been collecting data and information about how visitors arrive and move through these sites. I would look at the Analytics data once in a while, but I didn't look that closely (otherwise I would have noticed the mistake much sooner).

Anyway, yesterday as I was editing the homepage of my busiest online slots site, I noticed something. There was no Google Analytics code anywhere on the page!

<img src="images/icons/crap.gif" />

Apparently, for the last few months, Analytics has been gathering information about every page on the site except the one with the most visitors. :rolleyes: Man, did I feel dumb. I should have noticed this when I was reviewing the Analytics data -- the fact that the homepage wasn't listed anywhere should have been a huge clue....

Oh well, at least this wasn't an expensive mistake. A dumb one to make, for sure, but I didn't lose money or visitors.
 

sipka

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Lol, that's fun :D You might see double traffic in Analytics Dave from now on lol :D

I have had a funny experience lately, I was working on a site for another affiliate, and I have made a peel ad for the website. The website is in html, no CMS or anything, I put on the peel ad for the homepage, it worked fine. The aff asked if it can be displayed on every page, I said oh yes, just run a Dreamweaver Find/Replace on all the files (note: thousands of files in separate html files lol). I said: replace

HTML:
<body> with <body><peel ad script>
and it will work fine. But some pages didn't have
HTML:
<body>
lol (It's an old site, under construction now) just a
HTML:
<tbody>
at the beginning after head, and we agreed that ok, let's make an extended replace for
HTML:
<tbody> to <tbody><peel ad script>
. Well I don't really work with tbody when I make my codes, so I didn't think that all the tables on the website was constructed using tbody, so we ended up with 200 peel ads on one page LOL.

I can assure you that it looked funny ;D;D

Edited: post looked weird with the html tags, so I put them into html code.
 
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WCD Admin

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Worked to long without help.
Get Quickbooks NOW, not five years in. ;D
 

Guard Dog

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I agree with Quickbooks. Just started doing that in January. It's awesome and necessary, IMO.
 

alexpratt

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I was doing ppc and got kicked off Google UK so tried out French Google - Problem is I don't speak a word of french so entered a keyword in a french translator took that and put it in the keyword suggestion tool - Dumb I know!

It wasn't until a week later when I checked what was happening I realised I had spent a small fortune with just 2 players - At this point I asked my friend what the words meant and low and behold I was buying all sorted of ridiculous keywords from free arcade games to ones I am still embaressed to mention
 

Guard Dog

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I was doing ppc and got kicked off Google UK so tried out French Google - Problem is I don't speak a word of french so entered a keyword in a french translator took that and put it in the keyword suggestion tool - Dumb I know!

It wasn't until a week later when I checked what was happening I realised I had spent a small fortune with just 2 players - At this point I asked my friend what the words meant and low and behold I was buying all sorted of ridiculous keywords from free arcade games to ones I am still embaressed to mention


That is classic :) I'm sure you are not the only one who has done this. I would bet there are about 1000 guys doing this right now and losing money :)
 
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