My Trial & Error

I was a “hack-and-go” sort of person off the start. I have re-made thousands of
web pages, most of them by inefficient means. Some of my worst mistakes are:
using frames, trying to become an affiliate of over 1,000 websites, free money
scams, and generally creating garbage without learning about the web.

Business & Change

The Internet is a highly responsive, trackable medium. You should WANT to
change to evaluate consumer response. Successful businesses evolve. Successful
entrepreneurs keep learning. Few sites stay on top forever by being stagnant. It’s
hard to think of change before you even start building your site, but right now I
have thousands of pages that are reminding me of changes I still need to make.

Creating a Site Design

Seth Godin offered me some great advice for site design. He said, “The best way
to make a web page is to steal an outlay idea from another website that is not directly
competing with you.” When you go to make your first web page, do so as a sketch.
After you have a good idea (which is at least slightly different than the site you got
your idea from), recreate your home page as a picture in an editor such as Adobe
Photoshop. From there you can pay a design firm to create your page, or create it
yourself using a program such as Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Software such as Site Grinder and some companies like PSD2HTML and
XHTMLized convert Photoshop images to websites for affordable rates.
If you do not mind using an existing template, OSWD.org is a website that has a
bunch of free web designs you can chose from. Many content management
systems, such as blogs, also have free template galleries. You can start with one of
the designs and modify it to make it look unique.

Crafting Easy Site Wide Changes

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
How do you make it easy to change your site? One simple solution is to use
cascading style sheets to control the display of your information. When the Web
was created, the idea was to keep layout and information separate from one
another. Using external style sheets allows you to change virtually every aspect of
your site by making changes to one file. To do this, put the layout in a sheet called
‘yourchosenfilename.css’ and reference it in your other web pages. A code similar
to the following would go in the head section of your pages.

<link href=”/style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”>
For an example of how powerful CSS is, take a look at the CSS house. A couple of
the more popular resources on the web about cascading style sheets are the CSS
Zen Garden and W3 school’s CSS tutorial page. You may also want to view the
official W3C CSS guidance page.

Effects of Change on Branding

On a daily, weekly, or monthly basis you can choose to change your font type,
layout, colors…just about anything. You can do it in minutes and track the results.
Some branding experts, however, such as Rob Frankel, believe that changing too
frequently could hurt your brand.
Make sure you have a distinct idea of why and how you want to change before you
start altering things. If you realize many things are completely broken, then a
complete makeover might be in order, but typically it is best to change and test
only one thing at a time so you know the exact effects of any change.

How CSS Saves Time

You can link each page of your site to an external style sheet to control the display.
Many of the repetitive changes that would be made on every page can be done
simply by changing one file. This may not seem like a big deal while creating page
five or six, but if your site has 200 pages you will be glad that you used CSS!
CSS are not necessary for smaller sites, but are a great idea if you are building a
large content-based site. They also can help to improve the content-to-code ratio.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Another technique to control the look and design of a site is to use a content
management system. There are many dynamic languages people use such as PHP,
ASP, and ColdFusion. However, most people do not need an expensive content
management system. Before you invest heavily in a content management system
or design, you should know what the goals of the website are. Make sure any
content management system you would consider using produces search-enginefriendly
pages. (More about making a site search engine friendly later.)