Steve mentioned in a comment on my last post about the huge learning curve involved with this whole webmastering thing. Shortcuts can be taken, things can be outsourced, and sorftware can be purchased to make everything a bit less painful but I’m a firm believer that if you want to earn a good amount of money online you have to learn as much as you can about what it takes to get a website up and running and, more importantly, earning.

I thought it might be a good idea to make a list of everything I’ve learned so far as an example of how someone can go from knowing nothing to earning a nice monthly sum from their sites. It’s taken me seven years to get where I am now with a few years of not doing anything and a few years of working really hard but I’ve enjoyed the journey and look forward to learning more down the road.

• Basic HTML - My very first step was learning HTML. I’m not sure how I got into this whole thing… I think it started with me making a cheesy ‘about me’ type page with the one image I’d scanned into my computer. I logged onto an online tutorial, followed the steps and built my first webpage.
• FTP - Now that I had my very own shitty webpage I had to find a way to add it to all the other shitty webpages that made up the internet back in 2000. I’d never heard of Geocities or other places that hosted free websites but I did have some free web space with my ISP. So I downloaded wsFTP and spent a few days (maybe even weeks) extremely frustrated as I worked out how to upload my site’s files.
• Tables and More Advanced HTML - I’m an artist at heart and love a good design. My first website was not a shining example of a good design given that it looked like a Word document with an image in the middle. By looking at the page source of websites I liked I was able to figure out how tables worked and achieve the sort of layouts I wanted.
• Adobe Photodelux - I guess this is some sort of dumbed down version of Photoshop. It came with my printer and it was all I had so I learned how to make some basic images and how to manipulate photos.
• Animated GIFs - Yep, I was one of those people who went a bit crazy with the ol’ animated GIF. I took the images I’d created in Adobe Photodelux and downloaded some animation wizard program and created a seizure-inducing medley of online animation. My first ever site was called ‘All Things Canuck’ and was about, well, anything that was Canadian. I pimped that sucker out with enough spinning maple leaves to make a reader nauseous. I wish I had saved those files… it was so bad it was awesome.
• Domains & Hosting - It was about this time when I discovered that travel was my true passion and having just returned from a few weeks in Ireland I started Travoholic.com. I registered the domain name in 2001 with Network Solutions for an obscene $35/year. I was actually paying that up until two years ago because I didn’t think it was possible to change to a cheaper company. Oops. My first hosting account was with a company called Hostway and everything was pretty straightforward with that whole side of things.
• Affiliate Programs - Once my travel site was up and running, I signed up for Amazon’s affiliate program and have made $0.00 since that day. I also signed up to Commission Junction and am unhappy to report that I have also made $0.00 with them. I also added Hostelworld.com and I still remember my amazement when I made my first few dollars with them. I had to wait about two years to get my first $200 cheque but I was so excited about having made money from my site.
• Forms - The whole idea for my travel site was based around accepting hostel reviews from other travellers. At the time, if you can believe it, there were a few sites listing the names and addresses of hostels but nothing offering up opinions and that’s what I was looking for. Since nobody else was doing it, I decided I should and to do this I came up with a form for accepting reviews. I still use the same form I created five years ago and, to be honest, I don’t even check the email address the reviews go to because I get so much fake, spammy reviews. I’ll have to revisit this area at some point and sort the form out to filter the spam.
• Adobe Photoshop - After graduating from university in 2001 I went travelling to Australia and completely neglected my site. When I moved to London in 2002 I bought a laptop and it had Photoshop on it. I decided to overhaul my site and add an Australia section and spent a lot of time fiddling with things in Photoshop. I could definitely stand to take a course or buy a book on it, but for now I’m able to do most things I want to do.
• Google Adsense - This was the most important thing in getting me to take building websites seriously and was the spark I needed to start working hard again. The program itself is easy to use but there is a lot to it as far as tracking stats and maximising earnings by putting ads in the right places and there’s still a lot to learn.
• Server Side Includes (SSI) - My site by this point had grown to nearly 1000 pages and was extremely unruly. Every time I wanted to make a simple change to any part of the header, navigation or footer I would have to open each HTML file, make the change (or sometimes several changes), save it and upload it. Needless to say, this was a nightmare and I wanted to throw my laptop out the window on many occasions. I think there are ways to make templates with Dreamweaver but I couldn’t be bothered to learn how to use it. Then I stumbled onto SSI and life was about to become a lot easier. I spent weeks adjusting all my pages to include SSI but it was worth it. Now if I want to make a change I only have to alter one file instead of 1000. Saves some time. Just a bit.
• Search Engine Optimisation - Now that I was getting more serious about my websites I started visiting webmaster forums regularly and devouring information. I had never heard of SEO before but it seemed to be what everyone was talking about. I’d never paid attention to my search engine rankings and didn’t even have a stats tracking program. I made some changes to improve my SEO according to what I read on those boards and everything tanked! My site’s traffic nosedived and, to this day, I still have no idea why. I’m a bit wary now of fixing things that aren’t broken but all my new sites use any SEO tricks I’ve learned.
• Stats - I put the code for Add Free Stats onto my site and then switched over to Google Analytics later. I’m sure that I’m not using this program to anywhere near its potential so there’s still a lot of learning to do.
• CSS - Cascading Style Sheets are the devil. I have tried to get my head around them but to no avail. The stylesheets I’ve come up with so far are huge and unruly but I guess they get the job done in a very roundabout way. What I’ve learned so far though has done a lot to improve the look of my sites.
• Link Sales - Discovering that people want to buy space on my sites was another huge wakeup call. I explored Linkworth, Text Link Ads and selling links directly to companies and learned what space on my site is worth to other people.
• Paypal - There’s not much to it but I had to learn how to set up a Paypal account to start getting paid. I’ve managed to set up automatic incoming monthly payments which is handy.
• Google Maps - I love these suckers and have built a few myself by looking at examples on other sites. I think there are websites where you can have it build a map for you but I like to have full control and an understand of what’s going on so am willing to deal with some seriously confusing stuff to get there. The people over at the Google Maps API forum are amazingly helpful.
• Wordpress - Blogging is something I’ve avoided for a long time but with Wordpress it makes things easy and I’m loving it. Adding plugins and uploading themes was tricky to start out with but I’ve got the hang of it all now. I’ve also started delving into altering themes to suit my needs and it’s been frustrating at times but nothing a bit of trial and error can’t solve. If I had better knowledge of CSS I’m sure I’d be making quicker progress.

I’ve probably left some things off this list but for the most part that is my seven year learning curve laid out for you. I had long breaks in between doing nothing and I have had, and continue to have, some pretty frustrating times but I’m glad I’ve spent the time to learn everything for myself rather than taking shortcuts.

There are still loads of things I want to learn. Top of my list are Adobe Illustrator, more advanced CSS, and enough PHP to be able to tinker with behind the scenes stuff without the constant fear that I’m going to make my website implode with one false move.

When I think back on how far I’ve come I’m amazed. When I see a complete newbie just starting out I know exactly how long the road will be and how many obstacles there will be along the way but I would still tell them to stick with it no matter what because none of this is rocket science, it just takes a lot of desire and determination.

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I graduated from university in 2001 with a business degree but somehow managed to avoid learning anything. I scammed out of taking calculus altogether and couldn’t draw up a balance sheet if my life depended on it. Come to think of it, I’ve forgotten pretty much everything I learned in school except maybe how to mix some lethal cocktails and how to sleep in for an obscene amount of time.

I might not have absorbed much useful information in my years at uni but I did learn a bit about revenue and expenses. Based on this alone I can see that website publishing is a great business to be in.

My operating expenses consist of hosting and domain registration. I suppose I could factor in my laptop cost and yearly depreciation and all that complicated stuff but let’s just assume I’d have a laptop whether or not I was running a business and conveniently forget about it. I have, in the past, paid for links but let’s forget that too so I can stick to the minimum cost of keeping my websites running for a year:

• Domains - At the moment I have 15 which cost $10 per year for a total of $150.
• Hosting - I host all of my sites with Dreamhost which is about $150 a year.
• Internet - At the moment I pay £5 per month but when I start travelling I’ll be relying on free wiFi.

So my total yearly costs come in at around $300. My hosting is paid up until mid 2009 and most of my domain names are locked in until 2010 so I’ve got no operating expenses to worry about for awhile which is pretty sweet. Even when the time comes to pay the bills again, they’re not really that much when compared to the revenue this gig brings in. Actually, at the rate I’ve been going lately I’d able to cover my yearly operating expenses after one week.

If the internet collapsed tomorrow I would only be out of pocket a few hundred bucks but the earning potential is virtually unlimited. I don’t need a degree to know that publishing websites is a good business to be in!

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If you’ve got a decent website then there are lots of companies in your industry that want to give you free stuff. The travel industry does at least, I know from experience. So far I’ve managed to scam a two week unlimited Busabout pass, a canoe trip, a discount on a backpacker tour of Scotland, free books, a discount on travel insurance and heaps of random mugs, stickers and stationary that I’ll never use. Some of this has come my way without even having to ask and others have taken no more than a simple enquiry.

If you offer to do a write up on your site about a product or service, your chances of getting something are probably better. Publishing companies seem to give out new books for review pretty willingly so if a new title is out that you think your site or blog readers would like, hit them up for a copy. If you see an affiliate program that you’d like to use, contact them and ask for a sample of the product. Companies have it in their marketing budget to give freebies to people in their industry and if you don’t ask, you won’t get.

The trick to all of this is getting in touch with the person who pulls the strings and being able to sell yourself as an expert. If you can do this then you’ll almost always be guaranteed at least a wee package of crappy stickers or a mug or something. If your site is a good match with their product then you should be able to wrangle more than that.

I’ve only tried this a handful of times but in the few times I’ve tried this I’ve never been turned away without at least some sort of discount. I’m pretty confident that there are discounts and freebies out there ripe for the taking if you go for it. The most important thing is having a quality website that targets the same market.

Professional writers get free things all the time. Don’t devalue yourself or your website. Think of this as a legitimate business and consider yourself to be a writer in whichever industry you’re in. Just because you’re self employed doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the same perks as someone who works for a major magazine.

This is another example of why choosing a topic you’re passionate about is so important. I’m a lot more inclined to get excited about a few free nights at a hostel than I am about a 10% discount on car insurance!

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Back when I started building websites I sort of struggled through most things, never sure if how I was doing things was right or wrong. Nobody handed me an instruction manual at the beginning of all this and I’ve never known if the way I do things is similar to most people or completely out of whack.

One thing I’ve always wondered about is whether to write from a personal point of view, using the ‘I’ word, telling stories and giving opinions. Or whether it’s better to write as though the site is run by a company, using ‘we’ even though the site is run by one person and writing in a more professional manner. I’m not talking about blogs which are mostly personal but regular websites which seem to have a good mix of both styles.

Overall, I find corporate sounding sites pretty dry and uninspiring. I’m sure this style suits many topics but I’m not sure budget travel is one of them. I find the most useful information to be first hand and reading a personal account of someone’s travels complete with all their feelings about what’s going on is a thousand times better to me than the same information written in a guidebook format. The internet offers a great forum for people to tell their stories and offer first hand advice and giving a site a personal touch lets the reader feel like they’re a part of the adventure rather than feeling as though they’re looking in from the outside. If I want information in that form I can buy a guidebook or look up Wikipedia.

However as I start to treat this website building thing more and more like a business I’m wondering if I should lose the chatty writing style and perhaps become a bit more professional. The personal approach is great for getting my thoughts across but I wonder if people are more likely to trust advice from a random backpacker who knows how to build websites or a corporate sort of site with a nameless, faceless type setup.

I prefer sites with a bit of personality and I think I’ll stick with that approach for now because that’s how I prefer to write. What do you think… or am I the only freak to wonder about these sorts of things?

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First I get the camera, then I get the laptop, then I get the power. Ok maybe not power… then I get the plane ticket! I just bought a one-way flight to Manila, Philippines to arrive on January 10th and what I get up to after that is anyone’s guess but I see a lot of hammocks and cocktails in my future.

I’m not sure how I came to the decision to fly into the Philippines. I could have chosen some cheaper spots in Asia to start out. I guess my reasoning is that it’s sort of out of the way from the rest of Southeast Asia and if I didn’t start there I probably never would have been to cheap and lazy to hop a flight to the islands later on.

The plan is to spend a month or six weeks in the Philippines, hop over to Borneo for a few weeks to look around, pop in to Brunei to say g’day to the sultan dude and then continue on to the rest of Malaysia before flying out of Kuala Lumpur for Beijing in early April to hand around there until the Olympics.

Anything can happen between now and then but those are the rough plans and my feet are getting extremely itchy. It’s always been my dream to travel without any time limit or definite plans so I’ll  be taking things as they come and going with the flow as much as possible.

You may have noticed that I’ve got an extra link up top to a map. Well that’s not supposed to be there so pretend you didn’t see that, ok? I’m still working on the page but I can’t figure out how to do that without having the page visible to one and all. Yet another example of my lack of Wordpress knowledge I suppose!

The idea for the map is to have a marker for each place I’ve been. to When you click on the icon a list of blog posts for that place will pop up. These links will take you to my yet to be constructed travel blog where the posts will live. These posts will be purely travel related and aimed at family, friends and anyone who wants to stalk me (I’ve always wanted a stalker) and I guess the idea is to keep interested readers of my Nerdy Nomad blog informed about what I’m up to without having this blog overrun with posts about how bad my sun burn is and what I ate for breakfast. Plus I love Google maps and just wanted an excuse to add one to my site.

If anyone has been to the Philippines, Borneo or Malaysia or has any tips on cool things to do in Beijing I’d love suggestions!

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I’m officially a hard core nerd. I currently own two laptops and a desktop computer… that is far too many for a normal person. I’ve got a really old Sony that has been collecting dust since I bought my desktop back in May 2006. The Sony is really sluggish and is pretty big and heavy so carting that thing around the world was never really an option.

So I’ve been on the hunt lately for a more portable laptop and finally found my match! I just bought myself a super small 12.1″ IBM Thinkpad X41. It’s only 1.2kg, 1.6Mhz Intel Centrino, 1GB Ram, 40GB hard drive, wiFi, external CD drive, and 5 hours worth of battery. I’ve never liked widescreen laptops and can’t stand glossy screens and this computer has neither of those dubious improvements so that was a selling point as well. The red thing is my passport, the blue thing is a Swiss Army knife and I put my SLR camera to the right to give an idea of the laptop’s size. It weighs about the same as my camera and lens which I think is pretty amazing.

I bought it used off a totally non-dodgy guy who was getting an upgrade for work and I feel good about the purchase. I got it for £275 as well which is well below what I was willing to spend. I saw it on eBay for over £400 so I think I got a bargain. I was originally going to buy something either brand new or really flashy but I would have been paranoid about it all the time. It would suck if my laptop ever gets stolen but if it does it’s not the end of the world really because I haven’t spent that much on it. I just need to remember to keep everything backed up! It’s not super sexy either which might keep thieves away. IBMs seem to be pretty rugged as well so that’s another advantage.

It’ll take awhile to get used to using a laptop again, especially one with such a small screen when compared to my desktop. I’ll be keeping my desktop right up until I leave and am hoping to sell it to my housemate to cover the cost of the laptop. I’ll be heading up to Scotland for 10 days in October though and will be taking my new baby laptop up for a dry run and will report back on how I find using it.

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I built websites for years because I loved sharing info I had, helping people out and being creative. I had attempted unsuccessfully to make money through Amazon and made a few sales through a hostel booking system but it took me years to start earning any decent money. Here are the ways I monetise my websites:

• Google Adsense - This program has been around for years and has been the cause of much frustration. When I first started out in late 2004 I was amazed to be getting paid more than pennies per click and my $30 in my first month was what opened my eyes to the possibilities of earning online. Adsense is something that I can count on to be pretty steady each month. There’s not a lot of fluctuation in my earnings at the moment and things are steadily rising but it’s a long term commitment and should only be one piece of the web earnings puzzle. Putting all your eggs in the Adsense basket is risky because Google can boot you out at any time with no explanation.
• Affiliate programs - I’m no expert on affiliate marketing but I do know that that’s where the money is! Finding programs can be time consuming and frustrating but when you get a good match it will pay off. Before I’d made my first decent sale with an affiliate program I could have sworn the whole thing was some sort of scam made up to taunt me. But I tried a few different programs and eventually I made a few sales and then a few more and now I’m all about affiliates! If you’re not getting any sales at all then try something else. Keep trying different things because something will work eventually.
• Link sales through Digital Point - This forum is a goldmine for link sellers even if your sites are crappy. Money flies around this forum like crazy and it’s a good place to come to top up your Paypal account. I’m trying to phase this out because I find the links to be a bit spammy but it’s served me well in the past. Finding this forum is what kicked my earnings up to the next level.
• Approach businesses to sell ads - This is something I’ve done twice and been successful both times. If you’ve got a site that is aimed at their target market and can manage to get in touch with the person who deals with their marketing then you’ll be in with a chance. If you’ve got a good website with a clear target market that is in line with the businesses you approach then you’ve got something to offer.
• Text Link Ads - Getting into this program should set you on your way towards earning some seriously easy money. Once you’re accepted and place the code, TLA do everything for you and the links appear automatically once they’re approved by you. The problem is that they’re a bit picky about which sites they let into the program. I’ve had a few sites turned down. They say they review the rejected sites once a month to see if they’ve changed their mind but I’ve yet to hear back from them. I think the problem is that the sites are only PR2. I would suggest waiting until your site is a PR4 before you apply to protect against getting stuck in no man’s land like me.
• Linkworth - I was doing well with Linkworth for awhile but then they dumped all my links! Little buggers. But they work for a lot of people so give them a go as well. They offer a bigger payout than Text Link Ads at 70% and you can set your own price but the process isn’t automated so you have to add new links manually. It only takes a few minutes though so not really a big deal.

If you’re totally stumped about how to monetise your site, have a browse around sites that are similar to see what they’ve done. Scroll over their links to see which affiliate websites they use and then head to the affiliate site for a browse around.

There are plenty of other ways to earn a buck like selling ebooks, doing paid reviews and… uh… other stuff that I can’t think of at the moment. I’m still relatively new to all this and will keep you posted on any new money making methods I come across.

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Promoting my site is something that I’ve done in the past without really paying much attention. I’d do little things here and there but I’ve never sat down and made a conscious marketing plan or anything. I think it’s something I’ll focus on more once I have my sites all up and running and am doing this full time. But for now, here are a few things that I’ve done to promote my site or try to get it higher in the search engine rankings.

• Link to new site from my other sites - The first thing I do once I finish a new site is link to it like crazy from my existing sites. My budget travel site has had a lot of Google love in the past and links to my new sites from it have always gotten me listed pretty quickly. Once you have a network of similar sites linking between them is, I think, a great way to keep them all ranking well.
• Link exchanges - I don’t really do link exchanges much anymore. If I’m approached by someone wanting a link on Travoholic.com then I’ll sometimes agree but ask them to link to another site of mine instead of linking back. This creates a three way link and is supposed to be better for search engine rankings.
• Buy links on related sites - If I’m targeting some competitive keywords then I might consider buying links on another site. At the moment my focus is more on selling them, but if I see a bargain over on the Digital Point link sales forum I will scoop it up. Whether it helps with my site’s rankings though is anyone’s guess.
• Submit to search engines - The search engines will find you once you have some good inbound links but it doesn’t hurt to stalk them a bit.
• Post to relevant forums with the URL in the signature - I wouldn’t recommend that you go out and post to loads of forums just to promote your site because I think the time spent doing this won’t be worth the traffic you receive. But if you’re going to be posting to forums that interest you anyways, make sure you put your new site’s URL in the signature.
• Comment on blogs - Same as above. Bloggers are more likely to be interested in reading other blogs so instead of putting a link to one of my websites, I put one to this blog.
• Submit articles to other sites - I’ve heard lots of people singing the praises of article submission sites but I’ve never had any results. I think a better method is to create an original article and then contact a fellow blogger or website owner in the same niche about submitting your article or guest posting on their blog. I would happily accept unique articles for any of my sites and give out a bit of link love as payment and so will a lot of website owners. I guess it comes down to deciding whether it’s worth the time to write an article in exchange for a inbound links - I think it is. I write occasionally over on Brave New Traveler which brings in a bit of traffic, good one-way inbound links and $20 to boot!
• Google Adwords - I built a site awhile ago that pretty much exists solely to sell stuff. I wasn’t getting much traffic at all to the site so decided to use Adwords as an experiment. Didn’t seem to help much but didn’t cost me much either. There are people who use Adwords with a lot of success but I am not one of them.
• Contests - I’ve never run a contest before but I have an evil master plan in the pipeline that I’m hoping will bring attention to a new site I’m working on. The idea is to hit up people who run travel blogs, tell them about my new site and offer them an entry in a draw for some prize if they post a blog entry about it. No idea what the prize will be or if this will fly but I see a lot of money making blogs doing this sort of thing so it’s worth a try. I’ll post about it all in detail once I get things underway in a few weeks. The only way to see if it works is to try it out!

If your site’s content is good and unique then will make an impact on Google eventually. If it’s excellent then people might start linking back to it without having to be asked. Getting your site’s search engine rankings to rise is a complicated game and nobody really knows for sure what works but it’s sort of fun trying out lots of new things. I will definitely be taking a more pro-active approach in the near future and will keep you posted on whether my ideas turn out to be super successful or total flops.

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Once I have some content written and a design idea sketched out it’s time to get the sucker online. I should warn you that my website building methods are pretty old school. Actually, I don’t even think they went to school.

• Bust out Notepad - I’m living in the dark ages and still use Notepad to code my sites. Sometimes when I’m feeling really crazy I might use Notepad ++.
• Code like a demon - I code in HTML and am only recently coming to grips with CSS. If I’m building a site from scratch then I just get to it and start coding. I refer to my layout sketches and put everything into invisible tables even though I know it’s not ideal. I create a sort of shell where everything will slot into and go from there.
• Creating the visuals - Photoshop is the only thing I use for making images, tweaking photos, backgrounds etc. I’d like to learn how to use Illustrator but I don’t have the software just yet. I feel a bit limited with Photoshop when it comes to creating images from scratch but I always make due somehow.
• Always keep learning - I’ve taught myself how to build websites and it seems like I’ll never be done learning. Every new project presents new challenges and with each new site I build I come away with a little bit more knowledge. Learning new stuff takes extra time but by not trying new things I’d be limiting myself and my sites would be stuck back in the late 90’s. Things change too quickly not to at least attempt to keep up. I really should devote some time to learning Dreamweaver but I’m a creature of habit and I really don’t mind coding by hand. I know once I get around to learning it I’ll wonder how I ever survived without it but for the time being Notepad suits me.
• Ask lots of questions - Learning doesn’t have to be a solo endeavour and I seem to spend a lot of time hanging out on web message boards like by beloved Digital Point asking a ridiculous amount of questions. It never ceases to amaze me how many helpful people there are who will go out of their way to walk you through any problems you might be having. Things that seem frustratingly impossible aren’t really as scary once you start asking questions and breaking the problem down.
• Outsource the really hard stuff - No matter how much I read or how many questions I ask there’s not way I’m going to be able to whip up any cool tools with PHP or Java or whatever. If you I think of a good idea that I have no idea how to pull off I’ll find someone who does. Spending money on web stuff becomes a lot easier once you’re earning. I just think of it as reinvesting it back into my business.

I’m not sure my building advice is really that great because I’m still living in the past, but I just wanted to let everyone know that you don’t need all the latest software to build money-making sites. All you really need to get started is Notepad and an internet connection so get to it!

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Now it’s time for the good stuff! I love drawing and painting and it’s the creativity bit that attracted me to building websites in the first place. My original layouts back in the day were well stocked with hideous animated GIFs, frames, music and various other Web 2.0 no nos. Coming up with a great design isn’t most people’s priorities but creating something functional and that isn’t painful to look at is important and should be given some serious attention, even if your intention isn’t to create a masterpiece.

• Get a rough idea - When I’m trying to come up with a design for a new site from scratch I spend hours scouring the web for sites that I like. I’ll do searches for sites that have won design awards, look at other sites in my niche to see what they’re doing, and ask on forums for people to suggest some sites that they really like the design of.
• Sketch out the layout on paper - Before I go anywhere near a computer I’ll sit down with my trusty pencil and notepad and sketch out some layouts. I’ll use different ideas from different sites I’ve seen and I don’t usually come up with anything too radical or groundbreaking. Functionality is the main goal at this stage and I try to think how I would move from page to page. This is where I’ll decide:
• what I want the site’s width to be
• how many columns
• the width of each column (based usually on the width of the Adsense block I intend on using)
• where I plan to put ad units
• make lists of possible categories and sub categories
• where to put any newsletter forms or search boxes
• Establish the site’s navigation - For me coming up with a good system of navigation is the most important part of the design. It’s not as sexy as creating a logo or choosing a colour scheme but can make or break your site. Getting your structure right from the start will save lots of time and headaches down the road. To start the process I look at all the content I have  and think of how I can divide it up into categories. I write everything down in my notepad, grouping like things together and drawing arrows all over the place to see how things could link up. I try to not to bury things inside too many levels (folders) and make it possible to get between any pages with as few as two or three clicks. I used to have my main navigation in the left hand column but now I stick it up top under the header and have space for additional sub categories on the right hand side. Finding what works right for your site will probably take a bit of trial and error.
• Choosing a colour scheme - I don’t know what it is with me but I’m hopeless with colour. Even when I have a great set of colours I never seem to be able to figure out which colour to use where - links, background, titles etc. Above all, make sure people can read your content! Pink text on a yellow background isn’t going to cut it. I’ve used this Color Schemer site to help me figure out which colours look best together but from there it’s still a struggle because I need to see them in use on another site for it to really be of help. Choosing colours is usually the last thing I do.
• Creating a logo - Sorry, I lied. Creating a logo is the last thing I do because I need to match it with the site’s colours. This part is very frustrating for me because I think I’m capable of coming up with something really good and professional-ish looking but I feel limited in what I can do because I only have Photoshop. But having a good logo or header image isn’t really that important. People will still visit a site with great content even if it’s all text but having a nice logo/header is just that extra little bit that might keep your site in people’s minds.

I finally think I’ve come up with a template that I’m happy to use for any of my new sites for the time being. I’m never totally happy with my site designs but I think I’m getting there slowly. I’ve tried to stop obsessing over little things because ultimately, a site’s look isn’t hugely important. Although navigation and readability are, so make sure you get those right.

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