I was googling around for unusual ways to make money on the net yesterday and a blog post took me to milliondollarhomepage dot com. I might want to duplicate the concept.
My question is : what skills would I need to design such a homepage. Is it possible to create such a page on wordpress?
I wouldn’t dare visit this “million $” page. God only knows what kind of spambots and viruses lurk there. Perhaps this post is a legitimate query, but I am leery.
Hi Black Max, I understand ur apprehensions. The million $ homepage was setup by Alex Tew of England a few years back, to fund his University education. He sold each pixel on the homepage of the website for $1 each. The minimum purchase was 10*10 pixels = $ 100. All the million pixels were sold out and the concept recieved wide media coverage. I can’t really force u to visit the website.
Jhangora, don’t bother. The reason the 1 million dollar site worked was because it was innovative and clever, plenty of people have tried to rip-off the concept and none of them have worked. If you want to make a million dollars, you need a unique selling point and something worthy of selling, a copycat scheme doesn’t count. 
Alex, I differ on this point. Same could have been told to Mr. Brin and Mr. Page a decade and a bit more back. I mean how innovative can one be??? I am sure there were plenty of forums on the same topics on which sitepoint has been created. What makes it tick - it’s uniqueness??? I don’t think so.
I agree the concept has been ripped off coz I checked domain availability for million rupees dot com and similar sounding domain names and many of them were taken. I just want to know how to create this sort of page and if it’s possible to create it on wordpress.
Been thinking about joining a short course on web technologies. Would certainly try to copy the concept, maybe a few months later.
Well the whole pixel advertisement scheme hadn’t ever been done before (like they did it), so it was pretty unique. I expect it could be done with wordpress but seeing how many thousands of other websites have attempted that scheme (and failed), I wouldn’t bother. As for SitePoint, their more than a forum, their a publisher, podcaster, e-zine writer, article site and much more… it’s not the individual services that make them unique, it’s the success of their combination
The pixel thing might not have been done before but it was just a new twist to selling space for money - a concept which was prevalent long before internet was born. If I have the skills I might put it to some non-commercial use as well. I cud create a homepage which has links to websites on a particular niche, which I like, and care enough about to spend some $$$ every year on.
Even I am a publisher and so are tens of millions more. There is no dearth of podcasters either. I have contributed some articles to ezines as well and anyone can setup an article site and do much much more.
You are right about the success part. Nothing succeeds like success.
It takes a few seconds to work it out.
First he created a page with a table on it and one cell in it is 1000px x 1000px (one million pixels, $1 each)
Then he made an image to fit in that cell which was a grid of 10px x 10px. (probably by making a smaller grid of the squares, then pasting it repeatedly). This image was set as the background.
Then he made a similar sized image, and as sales were made, he pasted the image he received from the seller onto this image, One trick was probably to set the background of this second image as transparent so that the background grid showed through. After pasting each sale’s image, he added its coordinates to the image map and made a link to the appropriate buyer’s site.
Skills needed? Just enough to make an image, an image map and a big table to hold it. And an Paypal account probably.
Child’s play.
The hard bit? Inventing the idea before anyone else. THAT’S what made the money.
You could have a look at this script - http://www.milliondollarscript.com/ I’ve never used it myself so can’t give you a personal opinion on it.