Hi, this is ayay.co.uk, the newly revamped and revitalized site born from the ashes of wallpapers-free.co.uk. The primary change to proceedings is a new blog for the site. I will be posting news about new wallpapers, content and any other information worth sharing, but the main purpose of the blog will be to share photos – to create a pictorial record of the places I visit and present it with a bit of prose and a photo gallery. A new blog may not seem like a big deal but it will enable me to categorise and display a large amount of photos and images from my travels quickly and easily. I’ve already added some posts and pics describing some recent travels to interesting places – ancient villages, hidden towns, nature parks, old churches and mystical fantasy universes . I hope you enjoy the photos! And if you don’t, bah humbug to you! 🙂

Why Change the Site?

Wallpapers-free was only ever meant to be a casual undertaking, a pastime, a way to earn a little bit of extra money, something to beaver away with when there was nothing better to do. But as anyone who runs a website will tell you, it can become an addiction – even an obsession – as you tweaks things here and add things there to make the site better, bigger, stronger; and as you see the site grow and improve you tweak things again – and then again. And so I ended up spending more and more time with wallpapers-free. But I never really liked the name. Its not the name of a serious site, its an EMD (exact match domain) name. But changing the domain name of a site can be a tricky thing – you invariably lose traffic from the changeover – at least initially – and the changeover requires some serious effort. And the site was performing quite well. So I figured ” if it ain’t broke…” .

Well, then Google went and broke it. In September 2012 a change to their search ranking system in relation to EMD’s resulted in my wallpapers-free site traffic dropping by a half. Rather than get upset and annoyed by this misfortune I took a pragmatic approach to the whole sorry affair and tried to look at the positives. Did my site deserve the drop in traffic? No, but this sort of thing happens all the time with search rankings and is likely to happen again so you just have to roll with the punches. And  hadn’t Google given me the perfect opportunity to rebrand, improve and expand my site? I was now motivated to get my lost traffic back and then some. No silly search engine technology company with a funny name is going to beat me! Oh no! No sir!

So really I’m hoping the great google traffic crash will be a blessing in disguise for me.. Let’s find out 🙂