While so-called Age Verification Services (AVS) have been around for quite a while, many new adult Webmasters still do not understand them, or know how to build sites using them. Today I'll begin to show you a quick and easy way to bang one out from recycled free site parts...
The purpose was simple:
Dawn Elizabeth is converting her old free site into a single model amateur pay site, and wants to find a way to re-purpose some of the old site's content. After all, she put a lot of time and effort into coming up with certain parts of it, and being a smart girl who knows how to "work it," she didn't want anything to go to waste. One of the features she wanted to somehow re-use was her "girlfriends" gallery, and after a brief consultation with me, decided that it was decent fodder for a basic AVS site.
She's read many of my previous articles on AVS sites, and understood their benefits, including the direct and indirect revenue generation potential, the free link list traffic, and the limited legal "protection" that they provide, yet the actual mechanics of converting a free site into a basic AVS site eluded her. I assured her that it was a simple, painless process, and encouraged her to begin. She immediately took up the challenge.
Building Blocks
LJ's "girlfriends" gallery site was a selection of free, sponsor provided content from HELMY Cash featuring six "well known" Web girls modeling cute shirts displaying the logo and URL of the sponsor's "Orgy Party" site. With six photos of each model (for a total of 36 images), this was just enough content to meet the minimum requirements for a basic AVS site at most current services. Since I've successfully used CyberAge for years, I suggested that she go that route, and take advantage of their free hosting offer as well. Dawn looked at the pieces of her old site that she wanted to reuse, including some advertising snippets, and then decided that she could make this work.
Her "site" was already built for the most part, consisting of a main page with half a dozen thumbs on it each of which went to the gallery page of the girl shown on the main page thumb. These six gallery pages then also displayed half a dozen thumbs of the specific model. These thumbs all opened individual HTML pages with the full-sized pic, a bit of text, plus "BACK" and "NEXT" text links for simple navigation. A bold text link "Click Here for More!" opened the sponsor's site in a new browser Window. Simple, attractive, and effective:
A Little Paper Work
The first step was to find a new home for her site, one freely provided by CyberAge's banner-free free host partner, the CyberSex Network. While she could have easily left this site on her server, the AVS' own free host is fast, reliable, and free; so I recommended using it without hesitation. She filled out the brief application form, and in short order had a generous block of disk space and full FTP access to it. The only requirement being that she place a small email collection box on one of her pages to send traffic to the AVS' newsletter — a reasonable and non-traffic draining request, considering the service she received in exchange.
For bandwidth protection, the host requires that all images be placed in a protected subdirectory named "content." As this differed from her previous placement of images in a directory named, appropriately enough, "images," she needed to go through all her pages to update the links for this directory structure; a simple task in Notepad. After making sure that none of her links were malformed, she uploaded the basic site to her new host, and manually checked everything to be sure that she hadn't missed something important; a great idea: "You need to include your advertising and a few navigational tweaks first" I told her, and we went back to further cannibalize her old site.
At this point, she had successfully copied her original girlfriends gallery to her new free host, and was anxious to get started with converting it into an AVS site, a process that I assured her was no big deal, but that a little more groundwork was in order before she could get that far. Kitten now paced impatiently, but she also understood that a job worth doing was worth doing well, and right the first time. "You need to include your advertising and a few navigational tweaks first" I told her, and we went back to further cannibalize her old site, selecting the bits and pieces we would use to try and up sell members to the sponsor.
With these few additions, Dawn's new site's back-end or "protected member's area" will be complete, and ready for the AVS front-end installation. Tomorrow, we'll wrap this project up by installing the AVS front-end script set. Stay tuned: ~ Stephen
