dslade.blog

It’s been a long road for LessonsUnlimited.com, and now after nearly 3 years, it’s received a new face. Actually a complete renovation. Originally we did a quick and dirty launch using some website software we bought for classified ad systems, to get the site running.

It picked up in users and traffic but then as search engines got increasingly more sophisticated, or picky about what constitutes a “good” website, the traffic tapered off due to the clunky browse structure and incomprehensible URL structure. The URLs were MASSIVE. Yahoo continued to gobble up the site, but Google did not. And as everyone knows, if you want successful site you must bow to to the Google gods.

To make a long story short, LessonsUnlimited.com has now been launched with a completely new front end written to make the most of the latest PHP and CSS techniques and code. And hosted on a proper Linux server with the latest MySQL.

A category URL like this:

www.lessonsunlimited.com/cgi-bin/listings/listing.cgi?mojo=1&cat_a=&cat_b=77&cat_c=102&number=2&parent=0&cattype=c&trace=b

became this:

http://www.lessonsunlimited.com/lessons/103/salsa.html

See the difference? SEO nightmare, to dream over night. Within days all 400+ learning categories started delivering lessons related ads, relevant to the specific categories. So now all sorts of lessons, from Salsa lessons, Golf lessons, Drawing lessons, French lessons, Piano lessons to Poker lessons, are easy to browse, and find students and teachers.

As we hammer out a few issues, we’ll finally be able to start adding some new features and making things easier to use! We’re pretty excited about the potential. It’s still very much a side project to everything else we’re doing, but we’re excited about the potential for it.

Stay tuned for more private lessons mojo to come.

~ Dave