английский на youtube

This is from February 2007 and it's the first time that we can see an ad on the English Banana.com home page. It was quite a nice layout, with text making it clear for visitors (and, crucially, for the search engines) what the site was all about, and it was clear what the site was offering by now: "750+ Free Printable Worksheets...", the games, the quizzes, and the free books... Free books?! Wait a minute! I'll come to that soon! Everything that is still available today on the site. But I feel that this version of the home page lacked a little sparkle, or passion, if you will. There are no pictures - apart from the ad - and the whole thing looks kind of, well, functional.

2007 (visitors: 2,211,358; page views: 11,701,442)

Oct - Dec: From its zenith in the second quarter of this year, ads from Google Adsense began to show a serious and worrying decline. For the first time I thought about the possibility of registering with other ad companies, and applied to several different ones. Bearing in mind the aims of "The Fallow Year", ad revenue had become a more significant issue, particularly as it had grown steadily from autumn 2005 to the middle of 2006. No longer just pin money to cover the hosting charges (which had in any case been significantly reduced by my switching provider), I looked to the ad revenue to help me out with my credit card debt. I was forced to consider the uncomfortable possibility of losing this revenue. If that happened, would I still keep English Banana.com online, now featuring over 600 free printable worksheets? After all, I wanted to get something of value from the site too...

14th August: I started the English Banana.com channel on YouTube, so that I could upload the video podcasts that I had been making (see above).

English Banana.com's Channel on YouTube.

20th June: This was a great boost for "The Fallow Year" concept because the Yahoo! webhosting price plan was far cheaper than the Lycos deal. The hosting with Yahoo! was also more user-friendly and much easier to navigate.

I was inspired by Lynne Truss's mega best-selling book on punctuation "Eats, Shoots & Leaves", which had sparked an improbable nationwide interest in the apostrophe, and believed that my tome could be equally popular with both language students and native speakers of English (you can't fault the scale of my ambition!); a book for reading on the loo, or on the bus; for dipping into and testing your knowledge of grammar and punctuation marks. Sadly, the book didn't take off or sell well, but it enjoys a "long-tail" life on English Banana.com online and download sites such as Download.com and Scribd (more of which below). I optimistically named it "Book One" of a series, and I do have enough material for more Check It Again! books but, I fear, it's destined to remain an oddity: a curate's egg of a book - the least popular English Banana.com book by far. I still believe in it, though (as any proud parent would!), and feel it to be an original and helpful little book for practising some of the niceties and nooks and crannies of written English.

1st June: Check It Again! (Book One) (ISBN: 0954698584) was published. It wasn't published as a CD-ROM due to the lack of sales of the previous titles. I started working on this book in the second half of 2005, when the Big Resource Book was in its final stages. I wanted a break from books of worksheets, and had been collecting typos from newspapers, leaflets, and magazines, etc. throughout 2005. I wanted to encourage my students - and readers - by showing them that even trained professional native speakers of English are prone to making errors in language from time to time. I grouped the errors into six categories: "apostrophes", "articles", "doesn't make sense", "punctuation", "singular / plural", and "spelling". I was careful not to use each extract "as is" (for copyright reasons), and wrote a new text whilst keeping the same mistake or typo from the original text. I included copious notes and answers for each error and an "A-Z of English Grammar Words" - stuff that my generation (schoolchildren in the '80s) weren't taught in English lessons at school.

The site was successful for me, since I managed to learn almost all of the words! I got some good feedback about it; for example an email from a primary school teacher who suddenly had to teach several Polish children alongside English pupils in her class, as a result of the large number of economic migrants coming to the UK from Poland after its accession to the EU in 2004. However after the initial burst of energy - making thirty different vocabulary sets - and despite an attempt to use the "technology" with another language, French, I got bored with the site and/or other things took over. I've always had only a limited amount of time to work on English Banana.com (having been employed full-time as a teacher throughout the site's existence), as well as a limited attention span for making any one kind of resource.

Summer: In May 2006 I got engaged to Anna, a Polish lady whom I had met during the course of my work the previous autumn. Although she speaks English very well, I wanted to be able to talk to her family in Poland, and this site was the product of my trying to teach myself Polish. The site was online in its own right for about a year, but was amalgamated to become part of English Banana.com in 2007, as Channel Z had been before it. I borrowed the central design feature - how the vocabulary words change from Polish to English and vice versa, using the 'ImgOver' HTML tag - from the Picture Dictionary HTML, and this method of learning words seemed rather innovative. It was great to be able to design a completely new website from scratch, using what I'd learned from making the previous two. The vocabulary sets were Polish words that I wanted to learn - basic things for beginners, like "Days of the Week", "Fruit", and "In the Bathroom".

7th April: registered www.englishbanana.eu and www.english-banana.eu as a precautionary measure. One which was, in hindsight, absolutely unnecessary. But you never know!

I didn't have a video camera, just a video function on my digital camera, but that didn't stop me having a go! I figured that the originality of the content would make up for the poor quality of the resources. Another bonus with video podcasts was that they could be uploaded to YouTube - the site of the moment - and also embedded on my site, making it look up to date and "with it". I made ten English Banana.com video podcasts in all, mainly using the free Windows Movie Maker programme to put together animated sequences, rather than a video camera. As with other areas of the site's development, I didn't invest in it really, although this was "The Fallow Year". Had I bought a shiny video camera, would I have produced better videos - and more videos - and got more hits, and more this and that...? Yes, maybe. Like with the audio podcasts I ran out of steam after a while, but the great thing about the web is that the material you create can stay online and form an archive or library that anybody can dip into at any time.

The podcasts originated from my desire to add syndicated content to a feed that could be published all over the web. The buzzwords of the day were "RSS - Really Simple Syndication" and "Podcasting", that is creating small nuggets of content that could be advertised by way of a web feed in lots of different directories online. I began by syndicating content from pages of English Banana.com - a new page every day would be listed on the feed - but this developed into making short audio lessons, using a cheap microphone and free software from Audacity. Podcasting was all the rage, and - not shy of jumping on a passing bandwagon - I spotted a great opportunity to promote English Banana.com material in many of the new podcast directories that were springing up everywhere on the web - and the podcasts really did spread the englishbanana.com URL far and wide on the web. Plus I wanted to learn how to make an audio lesson. How cool! Somebody, somewhere else downloading and listening to my lesson! My interest in the audio podcasts waned after ten outings, laregly because I was keen to try my hand at video podcasts.

Feb - April: It seems astonishing to see this now, but I was selling individual worksheets (with the answers) for 15p a time on a site called Payloadz.com. They sold, but not in any great quantity. Let's face it, I wasn't going to become rich selling ten worksheets per day at 15p each. Even with my limited maths skills I realised that. I was also offering the three books for paid download on the same site.

Selling Individual Worksheets for 15p Each!

"Aim: after three busy years, to use the fourth "fallow year" to end non-income generating activities (e.g. print advertising) and pay back ё4,000 in 10 months from English Banana.com income to various debts that have built up in the course of growing the business (incl. x2 overdrafts and credit cards)."

In 2005 I had spent a couple of thousand pounds on the site - both promoting it (e.g. the print ads) and on adding new features that would hopefully attract either new income (the pay per download software) or new visitors (the postcards system), not to mention hosting costs which kept going up in line with the ever increasing number of visitors. In 2005 the number of pages viewed (3,589,936) was way up on the previous year (1,428,966), so I must have been doing something right. Sales had been relatively good throughout 2005 and during the last three months of that year the income from the ads was just starting to increase to something more significant. However, over the preceding five years or so, I had - by the benefit of various overdrafts, loans, and credit cards, and for various reasons - managed to achieve a personal debt of around ё12,000. As I faced the new year 2006 I decided to take stock of my and the site's financial positions. I wrote a short manifesto in which I determined not to invest money in the site during 2006, but to use all of the income generated to help pay off my debt. And that's more or less what I did. My resolution read as follows:

Er, what happened here? Did I really put this online as the home page? This was back in the era when the games section of the site was starting to become popular. Can you tell that I wanted people to play the games? In hindsight this is an awful design, but there's a homely note with the "Thanks to Jennifer..." message. The rest of the menu (as of 2005) continues below the fold, i.e. the bit that you have to scroll down to see.

2006 (visitors: 1,194,141; page views: 6,140,608)

English Banana.com - The Story of English Banana.com (Page 3)