Cooking with madeira - a google site

I spent a bit of time yesterday evening trying out Google sites. Here's my first:
Cooking with Madeira

There are advantages and disadvantages with it
The good:
- Free
- Pretty easy to use
- Monitisaton is easy, as Google ads are integrated

The bad:
- Its tricky to get started
- There are limits to where you can move pages once you have created them.
- Most of its power is in widgets, but these can run oddly.

There were also some odd integration issues with Amazon that I ended up going to the HTML to resolve. (The one with the Amazon Carousel was never fixed).

Overall I'm not too upset with the site, and will probably leave it up. I might even add more recipes as I find them, although I haven't yet settled on a format for the site.

Now I just need to find a madeira seller to link from it!

Discovery Modules

The Mossie one was more successful than I thought, and I only rolled it out this morning. As a result, I'm doing a full test of a discovery-style module on the video games lenses.(e.g. Dark Cloud)

Since I haven't changed these lenses for a few months they are all fairly stable in traffic terms. This means that once the modules are in place and the initial boost from the amending has gone, I can compare before and after.

Currently I am trying this by adding a hand coded piece of CSS to each intro module. In a few cases it is elsewhere on the page to see what the effect is and whether I get more cross-lens traffic. All the links are currently to my own lenses, but then I don't have permission to use anyone else's for the test.

If this is a success I will see about creating something, possibly in clearspring, that will emulate the old discovery module properly. Doing it by hand is a real chore - and I'm not looking forward to trying to update links!