Regional PHP sites exchange - PHP Classes blog

By Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.net
<email contact>

Since the early days, the PHP Classes site has been doing banner exchanges with other popular PHP sites. That initiative helped the community of users that frequent the involved sites to grow providing greater satisfaction to a larger number of PHP users.

Now the idea is to extend that exchange with popular PHP sites that are dedicated to communities of specific countries and regions around the world.

I have be doing this experiment with the http://phpbrasil.com/ site that is dedicated to the PHP developers that live in Brazil.

The way this works is that whenever a logged user from Brazil visits the the PHPClasses site, the banner of the PHPBrasil.com site is displayed with greater priority than the banners of other partner sites that are not dedicated to any specific country or region of the world.

The results have been fantastic. In this particular case, that banner has been reaching an average click-through rate of 1,7% . This means that for every 1000 times a user from Brazil that visits the site, in average 17 times the users click on the banner and are lead to the PHPBrasil.com site.

Likewise, the PHPBrasil.com has been displaying a version of the PHP Classes site banner in their pages to make this exchange fair to everybody. The result has been great and that made the PHPBrasil.com site lead so many users to the PHPClasses site that now it became the number 1 top partners site earning the greatest exposure in the top partners site:

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/top/top.html#partners

As you may see, right to the top partners site there is a top ranking of all sites according to Alexa.com traffic ranking. So, there is also the chance for regional partners site to get additional exposure if they reach to the top 10 positions.

If you have a site with resources dedicated to regional PHP users, please pay attention to the following requirements:

1. The site must be dedicated to only the users PHP language. Your site may include resources to other products besides PHP like databases that PHP can interface with but sites also dedicates to other languages can not take part of this banner exchange.

2. The site must in in the top 500,000 positions according to Alexa.com traffic ranking. If you have a site and want to know what is its ranking position, go to this page replacing www.myphpsitedomainhere.com by the domain of your site.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details?url=www.myphpsitedomainher ...

3. The site must have its own domain and belong to its own property. This means that your site can not be hosted in a sub-domain of property that has other sites for other purposes.

For instance, www.php.net would be acceptable, but br.php.net would not because it belongs to the php.net property that has other sites. The reason is that the Alexa.com traffic ranking would account for traffic of other sites too and it would be unfair for other sites that would be in disadvantage in the top partner sites ranking.

4. You need to supply the URL of a banner image and a icon image of formats GIF, JPEG and PNG. The banner must have the size 120x60 and the icon image must of the size 16x16. Please do not send images in other formats or sizes than these. Also do not send the images attached in e-mail message. I just need URLs of the images to be served from your sites.

5. You also need to supply the URL of the page that you would like to link to your site, an alias for your site with must not have more than 12 characters, a title for the the site and a description keywords of what it provides, like articles, tutorials, scripts, classes, forums, etc.. Please do not send me hype descriptions: we are the best PHP site in region. I just need a few keywords that can be used as alternative texts to your banners.

6. If your site is meant to serve a local PHP user group, please hold your breath. Later I will have a better initiative dedicated to local user groups. So, do not contact me now. I will contact you later when the site is ready.


If you have a site that meets these requirements or you have some questions, feel free to mail back with the necessary information sending a message to info at phpclasses.org .