Affiliate Related | Richard Pargeter – SEO, Web Development, Affiliate Marketing and anything else

Online discount vouchers and discount codes are now accepted as the norm in online shopping. The number of ‘voucher codes’ sites is near saturation point in the UK, so it’s worth remembering which web sites started the trend and what they are offering online consumers.

One the original sites I used to use was UK Frenzy (http://www.ukfrenzy.co.uk/) back in around 2002/2003. UK Frenzy was one of the original sites for online vouchers and regularly featured Amazon, Dell, Dixons and Comet Vouchers. Today they are still offering information in pretty much the same format and also have a fairly active forum of users sharing vouchers and online bargains.

The second site is started to use around 2005 was HotUKDeals (http://www.hotukdeals.com/). This site started small and rapidly grew into a massive list of product offers, deals and merchant specific voucher codes. Over the years the categorisation has changed but the site still offers a vast amount of fantastic buyer’s advice.

A third site that featured heavily in my online purchasing for sourcing bargains and money saving opportunities was Martin Lewis’s Money Saving Expert (http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com). In particular it was the user forums and specifically the Discount Vouchers and Discount Codes forum. Over the years Martin’s site has grown from strength to strength and is regularly featured on the BBC, but the true value of this site is its users. I regularly check back here to search for merchant vouchers.

The following two sites are close to my heart but also worth a mention.

Greedymoose (http://www.greedymoose.co.uk) was a site I set up in 2004 and ran till 2005/06. It hasn’t received much in the way of updates since then but at its time was heavily visited voucher code site that produced some good revenue. At its heyday it ran several unique discount vouchers that can still be found on some the later ‘voucher code’ sites – but at the time these were unique to GreedyMoose. Maybe soon GreedyMoose will have revamp – watch this space.

The final site that will be mentioned is UK Discount Vouchers (http://www.ukdiscountvouchers.co.uk/). UK Discount Vouchers (UKDV) was formed in mid 2004 as a user’s forum for discount vouchers and sharing them easily with fellow shoppers. This worked to a certain degree but forum spammers eventually got too much and the site was changed to a Blog in August 2006. Since 2006 the site has grown and has now transformed into a store specific site where users can access their favourite shops and easily check for discount vouchers and codes for that store.

So that’s a brief round-up of my original voucher code sites that I used and developed.

In customising WordPress you may find a need to occasionally remove or add to the Link elements that WordPress automatically outputs in the function call wp_head(). I’ve recently had a need to remove the rel=’prev’ and rel=’next’ link elements and in trying to avoid customising the core WordPress functions the following solutions works.

Ensure you have a functions.php file in your theme directory that you are using. If not create the file and edit the file. The following lines will help remove select lines from your wp_head() function:
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 ); // Removes the links to the extra feeds such as category feeds remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 ); // Removes links to the general feeds: Post and Comment Feed remove_action( 'wp_head', 'rsd_link'); // Removes the link to the Really Simple Discovery service endpoint, EditURI link remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link'); // Removes the link to the Windows Live Writer manifest file. remove_action( 'wp_head', 'index_rel_link'); // Removes the index link remove_action( 'wp_head', 'parent_post_rel_link'); // Removes the prev link remove_action( 'wp_head', 'start_post_rel_link'); // Removes the start link remove_action( 'wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link'); // Removes the relational links for the posts adjacent to the current post. remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_generator'); // Removes the WordPress version i.e. - WordPress 2.8.4
Don’t remove these items unless you have a need to. The WordPress generator removal could be useful if you are not religiously upgrading your WordPress install as it helps hide the WP version from potential hackers to a certain degree.