Welcome to lurecaster.com, a free website, classifieds and email service for the fisher-folk.
Lurecaster.com provides free Wordpress Blogs, which are a great website building software, not just blog system. Blogs allow you to keep an online journal of your fishing, in a more personalised way, or set up a website as you want it, easily. And we hope that the ongoing improvements to the service should see a great number of lure casters ( ok .. and those that use bait 
) have the ability to keep a running journal and point of entry for themselves on the internet.
You may want to just use the site to categorise your successes, tagging type of lure, weather and water turbidity. You may want to post and comment on interesting news and events from around the web. The choice is yours.
Currently we are only accepting blogs from Australia.
You can Login or Create a new blog
We have recently moved Lurecaster.com to new servers at Equinix Data center in Sydney, Australia.
Australians should notice a dramatic improvement to speed on sites.
Building a better Fishing business website, an Aussie entrepreneurs short guide.
09 Dec
Posted by admin as Guides
With any site, it has to be hosted somewhere. Usually the options are local Australian hosting, or Overseas hosting.
To sum up the benefits of each, overseas hosting is cheaper, and Australian based hosting has faster response times, it’s a balance really. You can start with overseas hosting, and as your business grows, move to Australian based hosting, but really, I recommend making the additional outlay for hosting locally. A faster more responsive site seems that bit more professional.
The main aim of your site, is to push your product, and having a site that is professional, gives your customers confidence. Having a consistant and clean look to your site, which is easy on the eye and quick to navigate, is one of the main factors in increasing sales.
If you are looking at doing online e-commerce, there’s a myriad of options for payment methods, and they can get quite expensive, especially when wanting to do credit card transactions. You might want to start with direct debit and money orders, then PayPal, Paymate or other merchant gateways, or if cashed up, look at real time Credit card transactions. Most popular shopping cart software handles all these. Always talk to your bank about what they recommend if wanting to do credit card transactions, it’s usually not cheap. (NAB are actually quite good, and will even help do the work of making the software connections to the bank for you! e-path.com.au and www.directone.com.au to name a few integrate with oscommerce and zen-cart, linked below, there are too many options to mention them all!)
There’s two types of software for shopping carts, commercial and opensource software. Commercial software you pay for the software itself, and are locked in to working within the providers framework of costs for additions and changes. Free Opensource software is an extremely viable alternative, and because anyone can view and change the code, with thousands of people contributing to it, you can both install and manage changes yourself, hugely cutting costs. If you really need help with installation or changes, any web site developer worth their salt, should be able to do so. Therefore, you can really find and bargain over costs in this regard, the bargaining power is back in your hands.
Before I get to far into it, I’ll just say, that your best option is to get hosting that comes with an opensource shopping cart. You will be paying roughly $120-$600 per year, depending on the setup integration already done. That’s not really bad is it? 
If your current hosting account has a ‘database’ allowed, you just need to install the software, and your set to go!
here’s some options to look at to get you started :
http://www.magentocommerce.com
http://www.zen-cart.com
http://www.oscommerce.com
http://www.opencart.com
http://www.ubercart.org
http://www.cubecart.com (version3 is free, the latest version supported costs money)
Even if you don’t use a cart, and especially if you don’t use a cart, you have to make sure your site is built correctly. Some small things can make a huge difference when it comes to things like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Make sure you have ‘Title’ attributes on all your pages, search engines read the title and structural names of parts of a site as well as the content.
Make sure your images are as small in file size as possible, only have large images if you need to show detail, and I recommend that you link from a smaller thumbnail image to the full image if you do need to, thus lowering the time it takes for pages to load, but allowing those interested to see more if they wish.
‘Copy’ is the text on a page. This is what search engines see, and the main thing they use for returning results to those searching the web. Make sure you use the same terminology on your pages that people will use to search for it. Make your pages small in size, large pages are hard to read, and usually aren’t.
Keep your navigation to a minimum. Research shows that pages with more than 7 links slow people down in trying to navigate, and seem crowded. People browse fast, and you want people to find what they are after, quickly and easily. Farm people off into various areas as quick as possible. Small navigation listings gives people a sense of cleanliness and professionalism.
All in all, it’s relatively cheap to get started in a professional way. Let’s sum up :
1/ Look for adequate hosting, that allows a database, or better yet, has an integrated option of shopping cart ($120 to $600 per annum)
2/ Go for a free opensource software shopping solution. You can always get help if you need it they are very well documented, and searches on the web for your problem find free answers, or ways to get free answers, like forums for the product. Worst comes to worst, you can talk to most web developers, and find the cheapest option, for them to install for you, or fix your problem.
3/ Look at the types of transactions you want to do before choosing an option, make sure with your bank, that things will work. Better yet, ask for their recommendation for a free opensource shopping cart, if wishing to do credit card transactions.
4/ Make sure the content, titles and images of your page have your attention. Use the words that people will search for, in your ‘copy’ or text of your pages, and keep your file sizes and pages as small with good text as possible.
The above should get you started, feel free to comment below to help improve this resource for all.
Lurecaster.com free fishing oriented trading site trade.lurecaster.com
07 Dec
Posted by admin as Site Updates
Want to trade some gear? want a place to advertise your lures, tackle or boat your selling?
Login to trade.lurecaster.com and advertise for free!
Want an email address like MYNAME@lurecaster.com to go along with your site MYNAME.lurecaster.com? Now you can, and with a top of the line webmail interface.
Lurecaster.com has partnered with Google to provide free email accounts, calendaring, and a custom Google search page for our users.
You must have a blog/site on lurecaster.com with the same name as your email account. You can check for availability here
Once you have created your site, use the form below to send us the blog URL and thus name you request, and it should be setup in the next 24hrs.
Email Login: http://mail.lurecaster.com
Start Page: http://search.lurecaster.com
Calendar: http://calendar.lurecaster.com
We suggest you set search.lurecaster.com as your browser homepage.
You can now change your blog/website address from within the management screen of your site. Just go to Options / Publishing and enter the new site address (subject to availability of course!)
We have installed Spam Karma 2 for users in the plugins section of your site, as well as Bad Behaviour. Both these plugins will help in fighting ‘comment spam’
You are advised to switch these on in your blogs, to help avoid those nasty spam bots from posting a lot of garbage.
Photo Galleries have been added, and you can also see your usage of uploads from the users Dashboard now, initially we have set this to 10meg a user, but will be raising this as needed.
The main menu to manage the Photo Gallery is in :
Manage -> Photo Gallery
You can set where you show the gallery. The default is blogurl/?p=gallery but it can be changed, for example to /gallery or /photos. Other options can also be set. Once saved, the Photo Gallery is activated.
To add an album, go back to Manage ->Photo Gallery.
You can add albums first, then upload photos in them.
You may notice now you can add links to video on YouTube and Google Video amongst others, as well as link to an FLV (flash video) file on another server. There’s an icon on the ‘write post’ page for this, and you can see it in action here
Welcome to lurecaster.com, a blogging service for the fisher-folk.
Blogs allow you to keep an online journal of your fishing, in a more personalised way. And we hope that the ongoing improvements to the service should see a great number of lure casters ( ok .. and those that use bait ) have the ability to keep a running journal and point of entry for themselves on the internet.
You may want to just use the site to categorise your successes, tagging type of lure, weather and water turbidity. You may want to post and comment on interesting news and events from around the web. The choice is yours.
Oh, and while your at it .. why not join our GreenFish mailing list? here you can discuss via email Australias greatest sport, hunting our natives.
A big thanks to all the catch and release cod-masters on tacklebox.com.au and murraymonsters.com for this site existing.
catch and release,
The LureCaster Team
