I get a lot of questions from people wanting to build a web based business. I’m not talking about becoming a web designer or a web programmer, I am talking about building a website and then making money off it.
Sometimes, people just want to put up articles and then sell other peoples products (through affiliate programs) other times they simply want to put up a bunch of ads.
The more ambitious want to sell a service or a product. This blog post is going to be about how to do that … in a nutshell.
What do you need to know (and what to do,) to set up a web based business?
Well, before I get into it, I should mention the stay at home mom who contacted me recently. She had an idea for a website and her goal was to generate ad revenue and sell memberships/access to premium content. She was asking a bunch of questions about setting up a forum, an e-commerce system etc …
So the first thing I ask when people come to me with these questions, is if they know anything about building websites? If you don’t know much, you will either:
Need to hire someone.
Or, learn some web skills.
Since this mom in question had no money to pay someone to build her site, she was going to have to learn. Before I get into what you have to learn, when you are a do-it-yourself web entrepreneur, let’s quickly talk about NOT ‘putting the cart before the horse’.
Building a website can be a daunting process … there is a lot to do! And sometimes, it’s hard to figure out where to start!
No worries though, after nearly 20 yrs experience, I’ve figured it out for you!
The steps:
1. Diagram the site:
Create a hierarchical map of the website. This will allow you to properly plan out all the pages and as an added bonus, the main menu for the website becomes easy to map out.
No need to use any special software … just a pen and paper will do! Draw boxes (that represent web pages) and connect them with lines that represent the links between pages.
2. Create the Content:
Write out the content (text only) for each page in the site diagram. Be sure to include sub headings and sections on the pages. You can use any simple text editor (MS Word, Apple Pages etc …) to do this.
3. Usability:
Once you have the websites content in place, it’s time to look at how you can rearrange the order/placement of page elements … to make it easier for people to find things.
Hint: logical menus can play a big role in this. So again, the quickest way to get this going is to draw out your pages on paper.
4. Design:
With the first three steps complete, you are ready to consider the design/look of the site. Though the design phase of the process is largely about making your site look good, a lot of consideration for usability has to be kept in mind – be sure that the design does NOT get in the way of how easy the site is to navigate.
In the PDF attached to this blog post I’ve included a couple of images that I was too lazy to link embed directly here.
🙂
If you want to learn much more about web design, you may want to check out my popular training package: Complete Web Designer
In the last year or so, Google has basically turned the whole SEO industry on its’ head: once coveted ‘techniques’ and strategies that permeated the SEO industry, actually went from being a benefit to websites to sometimes being the cause of their doom.
… Many, many highly ‘optimized’ sites got taken to the woodshed (and then behind the woodshed!) because of SEO!
Why did the vast majority of SEO fail?
In a nutshell: most SEO techniques gamed the system.
Rather than structuring websites (and their web marketing efforts) in a way that the Web wants, most SEO firms went the route of trying to exploit weaknesses in the search engines.
… Any system based on loopholes, will eventually get wrecked as those holes are filled. Common SEO practices suffered the same fate.
Not all sites got killed – why?
Some people realized a long time ago, that SEO practices and strategies based on loopholes, was not the way to go. A very few forward thinking web masters, adopted a long term view of SEO and web marketing practices and as such, the avoided the trashing and thrashing the others got.
… If you want to properly promote your site, you need to understand how to be forward thinking. That what’s I’ve always practiced at KillerSites and that’s why all our sites still rank well in the engines …. for well over a decade now.
Many years ago, during the time of the dinosaurs, I was taught a very important rule about the perfection of technique:
… The master’s movement is polished, minimal, without waste or clutter. One of the primary goals of a martial artist, is to strip away non essential movement, and to clear ones mind of distracting thoughts.
What the heck does this have to do with web design?
In web design, you have many competing options available to you where many times, there is no clear cut winner.
… But there are some things, that you simply should not do in most cases.
1. Flash based websites – don’t build them!
The Flash nerds who read this are not going to be happy. A lot of people hate change, especially when something new comes along that replaces what they are used to. For Flash, this thing is HTML5 and CSS3 … these two widely adopted technologies replaces Flash for animation, easy page layout and many other things.
So why is Flash to be avoided?
A pure Flash based website has always been a bad idea. Today though, it is a disaster because iPad, iPhone and generally speaking, most other mobile web browsers cannot and will not be able to properly view Flash or in the case of iPhones and iPads, even see it at all!
Why should you care that people on smartphones can’t see your Flash site? Because, as much as 50% of the Web’s traffic is from mobile devices.
Beyond that, Flash is terrible in terms of search engines (this means terrible SEO) and you also have the added overhead of having to buy the Flash program to edit the Flash files. Whereas with HTML5 and CSS3, all you have to do is open the pages up in a simple text editor to make changes.
Recently someone asked whether they should learn Dreamweaver OR whether should they jump into a CMS like Joomla or WordPress.
What is a CMS?
CMS is short for Content Management System, and are web based programs that you upload to the server and they provide word-processor like capabilities to your website – and much, much more.
To make an analogy: you can think of a CMS as being a restaurant buffet, where you have many prepared dishes to choose from, that you can use to create your meal. Where Dreamweaver is like an electric appliance, that helps you create a meal from scratch.
I was recently asked a question about the future of web design:
I have a short general query about the Future of Web Design: do you think that we are going towards a trend where, particularly with the use of Web environments like WordPress or Joomla, programming skills will be more and more oriented towards updating and customising plugins?
My answer:
I have been a long time believer in this strategy of using a CMS as the basis of almost all your web design projects. I wrote about this back in 2010, talking about the ‘WordPress Web Designer‘.
I use WordPress for my web sites, but Drupal and Joomla can do a great job too. You just have to figure out which one suits you best.
Learning PHP and JavaScript:
Since Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are built with PHP and JavaScript, it makes sense (if you really want to learn how to use these tools to their fullest,) that you should learn at least a little programming. You don’t have to become a full-blown nerd coder, but you should be able to write simple scripts and modify existing PHP and JavaScript code. It will make your life so much easier.
For a more detailed discussion, watch my video below:
As predicted, Flash has now gone HTML5 – yes, you can now export your Flash work to HTML5 using the new Flash CS6.
I haven’t had a chance to look at it, so I have no comment with regards to how well it works. Nonetheless, this is more evidence that HTML5 is going to be huge in the future of web design and web development – if it isn’t already!
Flash CS6 basically uses the CreateJS open source framework, to output animations in Flash. I don’t know how powerful this conversion process is yet … we will soon see how complex the Flash projects can be and still be able to output them via HTML5.
