I bought PHP Galleria a while ago on Flippa for $1500. I redesigned it, added new features, did some SEO on it, and few usability upgrades. Hopefully it will result in conversion increase.

Following is a complete list of all that was done to the site:

• Bought a new OsCommerce template for it and integrated it ($125)
• Added new features such as Google Sitemap, easier checkout process, better categorization of products.
• Made some on-site search engine optimizations such as more descriptive product descriptions, H1 and H2 tags, title tags, SEO URLs, better linking structure.

My total cost of the site including site purchase, coding work, and template was $1500+$45+125-$400 = $1265. The last $400 was refunded back to me from the original owner because PHP Galleria files had some sort of malware of it when I got it (which I removed and now does not affect the site anymore).

Right now the site makes about $100 to $150 a month. I am hoping to improve it to $250 to $300 a month and then sell the site back on Flippa.

How Site Looked Before:

How Site Looks Now:

Over a month ago I  bought a website from someone on Flippa who turned out to be a scam artist. I wrote about the story a while ago too.

Long story short: Once I bought the site, I paid through Escrow and he sent me the files. The traffic was not even close to what he was claiming on the auction. The earnings were off too (Adsense earning). Since traffic was about 1/100 what he was claiming I doubted the legitimacy of the Adsense income too.

Anyways, I decided to return the site and needless to say the owner wasn’t happy. He filed a dispute with Escrow and dragged it (literally) as long as possible. This meant going through three different phases of dispute resolution each about 2 weeks.

Today I received an email from Escrow that they are going to wire my money ($1700) back to my account which is great news. The site’s owner has actually completely abandoned the site which is now a parked domain. He was claiming $400 a month income on it at the auction.

After this experience I am never going to buy another website (or sell it) using any form of payment other than Escrow. It might have taken a long time to get my money back but at least I did.

I had yet another problem on Automation News. At first the wordpress posts were showing up blank. I got that fixed.

Now the pages were not showing up at all. I could see the pages in the admin area but when browsing to them on the site I was getting 404 error pages.

Here is how I got mine fixed:

1. Turned Permalinks to default
2. Saved it
3. Turned Permalinks to what it was before

Don’t ask me how it worked but it did.

Few days ago all the posts on Automation News WordPress blog were showing up as blank posts. This happened completely out of nowhere. I hadn’t updated or upgraded any plugins nor did I have edited the template in any way. Here is a screen shot of what the site looked like:

I looked at the database in PHPMyAdmin and lo and behold my WP_Posts table had crashed. A simple database repair fixed it.

To fix yours

1. Check PHPMyAdmin for any crashed table(s)
2. Check the box for that table
3. In the bottom of the PHPMyAdmin page (in the dropdown choices) choose Repair
4. Your posts are back online

Here is a screen shot of the PHPMyAdmin page:

Dear Flippa,

Please don’t allow autoblog (with HUGE ADSENSE income – as the sellers like to use for the titles) auction listings.

These are not good websites and are honestly filling a large part of Flippa auctions up. I constantly browse Flippa for new websites to buy and hope the quality of the listings stay high.