As our site grows every day we want to share some information with you on the way we are operating the project. We call this section «Business Blog» as it is similar to doing a log book where data is recorded in a chronological order. «Blogging» is gaining popularity with more and more people picking up the habit of publishing their experiences and thoughts on the Internet. Our Blog covers various topics — from TOEFL, TOEIC, MBA, GMAT, ESL/EFL test preperation to cultural traditions and current political events.
There will also be some Internet marketing terminology and if you have any questions regarding the information simply let us know.

The Business Blog is written by Torsten Daerr and edited by Alan Townend.

2004 — February 02
Statistical information can sometimes be interesting, especially when it concerns online business. When you run a website there is a whole heap of numbers and figures you can check back and forth. First of all there is the amount of webpages your site has. With english-test.net it is a bit tricky to establish this figure exactly as the tests Alan is writing are split into several files to make each test interactive. However, we do know the total number of tests — as of today you can choose from 193 unique multiple choice tests aimed at improving your grammar and vocabulary skills and thereby preparing you for an English language exam such as the TOEFL or TOEIC test.

As you know we also provide a newsletter and I can honestly say that you won't find anything similar anywhere on the whole wide web because Alan writes highly interesting and entirely unique articles on English expressions. His latest creation is about idioms with the word «head». We'll send it out to more than 1000 subscribers the first week in February.

Are you up for more numbers? Well, if so I can feed you with additional data on english-test.net soon…

2004 — January 28
With Germany being the country where about 17% of all english-test.net users come from, it is hardly surprising that a large number of our back links are to German sites. One of them is Engine — English for Engineers. It is run by a Darmstadt based company that publishes a range of industry magazines such as «Engine» where you will find the latest information on technology in English.

I picked out one called «From Wind to Waves» and no doubt you can imagine what it is about: Yes, it describes how windmills are currently generating electricity in many European countries. In the article the new technology is called «efficient», which reminds me of a discussion I had recently with a German engineer who told me that those windmills are subsidized by the state — or rather by the taxpayers and that most of those machineS have to be replaced after 5 years because they wear out very fast. He said this technology might serve as an effective tool in the battle for voters but from an economic point of view it's not profitable. I'm sure there is a lot of controversy here...

2004 — January 27
Google started another major update of their database late last Saturday and as a result our site has dropped some 60 or so positions on one of our major key phrases — «english test». When you now search Google for «english test» you still will find englishlearner.com — a site that was updated almost 2 months ago but has been around for a couple of years and I guess this is the reason for Elek M?th?'s high ranking. What also counts is Google's PageRank system, which interestingly enough was introduced and developed by Larry Page. It evaluates each web page of a website regarding its importance and assigns it a rank on a 0 - 10 scale. You can see each a page's PageRank when you download and install Google's free toolbar. As of now our main page has a PageRank of 5 with a number of subpages ranking at 4 and 3. I'm sure that in the fullness time english-test.net will increase its pagerank and its positioning in search engines. Ever since we first registered our domain, Google has been very friendly and fair with indexing our pages. Why am I once again dwelling on this topic? Well, we are running on a very low advertising budget to keep our site free for our users. We are covering our costs by the revenue we are generating through Adsense and the more people who visit our site the better will be the chances for our project.

2004 — January 25
Building and maintaining a website is a demanding endeavour that calls for consistency and resilience as well as creativity. Yesterday one of our users asked us on the forum why there are no new articles and stories. Well, Alan has written a new story which we will split into three parts because it's as interesting as it is long. In addition he has already completed the newsletter for February featuring expressions with «head». Why is the story not online yet? Well, we are working on a new system that allows us almost instantly to publish any text file. As of now this is a rather time consuming process that has to be better organized.
One of the benefits of being your own boss is that you can decide for yourself what to do next, when and with whom. We are working at our own pace and english-test.net is the ideal place to keep in touch with our students because the forum is open 24 hours a day and you have probably noticed that we answer any of your questions without delay. Alan checks the forum for new postings several times a day and so do I. There are still two weeks left that I'll be working with two groups of former employees of Carl Zeiss and Jenoptic.
It's a very rewarding job as those people are highly motivated and know how to keep their spirits up. By the way, this time Mr Romanos will be conducting a two week cross cultural training program for a group of executives at the same place. More on that soon…