The first line of code always starts with a single thought, “What am I doing?”.  The only people that don’t ask that are those that already know where they’re going. You can build a web site without having any idea where you’re going, in fact I encourage it!  Play all day long on stuff that you can learn from and then throw away. How else are you to learn how to build these things anyway?  However, when you plan a website like I’m doing, you need to ask questions, and you need to get answers.

Building a website is very much like painting a room. You have to decide on a color to paint the room as much as you need to decide on a theme, design, look and feel or skin for your website.  Not only that, you need to figure out how you’re going to lay out the URL’s that will comprise the site.  In fact, there’s a laundry list of questions that you should ask before you start writing a single line of code.

Here are some of the questions I’m going to be asking myself as I design a photography based web site.  Even if you or I don’t know the answers to these questions, they will tell us that the area in question will need extra attention and perhaps some research before getting a true answer.  That shouldn’t stop anything from progressing forward though, I’ve already answered those questions for myself before embarking on this journey.

1. How will the site be built? Can we use blog engine software to create the site, or do we need to look at a different Content Management System (CMS)?  Does the site require any functionality that isn’t found in WordPress, or any of the other free CMS packages out there?  By utilizing the strength of one of the many open-source applications, the development time can be significantly reduced.  Otherwise the site might need some development time factored in.
2. What’s the theme going to be? There are plenty of free theme resources out there, and a great number of themes for WordPress that are also free.  Will it be designed by a professional designer, or will the site grow into a theme from a pre-existing template?
3. What is the main reason for building the web site? The answer to this might dictate a bit of the design, or even how you want to market the site.
4. What are the visitor demographics? Who the site is targeting could impact design.  A site for video games will have different design elements than a beauty supply site would.
5. How will the site be promoted? How can the site leverage social traffic?  Is the focus on search traffic?  Is it all of the above?
6. What resources are required to complete the web site? If you’re planning on a custom theme, who is doing the graphics, HTML and CSS work?  Are there any custom forms or processes that require programmer?
7. Will the site generate revenue? Can the site generate revenue? How will advertising and other money making activities impact design? Does it matter?
8. Will the site interact with the visitors beyond being a digital brochure or shop? If a blog engine is being used as the core of the site, will comments be allowed?  Including any user generated content can introduce an amount of routine maintenance that someone will need to manage.
9. How will the site grow, and when will it stop? Are there several sources that will supply the site with fresh content?  Is the site designed around a limited set of pages?  Is this site going to be around forever, or will there come a time that it gets shut down?
10. What sites will be competing with my site? Not only do you have to concern yourself with your direct competitors, but also with anyone else trying to rank for your selected keywords.

These questions are important to ask as they help generate an image of what the end result will look like, act like, and how it will be used on a daily basis.  But like I mentioned above, you could also ignore all these questions and just start building the website and move it right along just fine.  It really depends on the project and its goals.

The number of questions you could truly ask is near unlimited as you might imagine.  For example, you might also ask what keywords the primary targets for the web site will be and base your judgement around how the category structure might fit that nicely, or not so nicely.

But now it’s your turn

If you can think of any questions you might ask yourself when planning a website, let me know by leaving a comment below.  May the back row be warned that asking “how to build a web site” isn’t a valid question.  Sorry back row.  I’ll follow this post up with my own answers to the questions that will define the site I’ll be building, and I’ll answer any of yours below in the comments.

One last point on developing websites and how it’s similar to painting a room: if you don’t ask questions, you also risk painting yourself into a corner with your website, or at least causing more work than is necessary.  However, even if you don’t ask questions this extensively before putting in the hours it will take to get a site up and running, you can still make a great website.  Just be prepared to answer the questions as they come up.

Eventually they will come up, they always do.

Question everything until it makes sense, that’s what I always say.

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Let’s just hop right into the numbers.  By this time you’re well aware of the services I’m using, and you should know why I’m using them.  The prior MMO Status reports are good fodder to catch up on that if you haven’t already (they are also below in the related posts section).

Here’s what I made for January 2010

eBay - $603.92
AdSense - $71.75
Chitika - $27.51 – Sign up! I’m finding this compliments AdSense nicely!
DiggityHost.com – $3.04

That makes the total for January $706.22.

I’m optimistic about the next few months as I have a few things up my sleeves.  You’ll have to wait to find out more about that.  If you know me at all, I never have only one iron in the fire.

I’ve stretched out a bit and included a few new affiliate programs within my network of sites, but none have really had a chance to do anything yet.  I’m hoping after this quarter passes that one or two of them will begin bearing fruit. If they don’t, then I’ll take a look at the site to see if there is anything I can do to improve the potential, or drop the affiliate program altogether.

At the end of the day though, if you want to make money online, you have to build a web site.  Without a web site, you’ll never start.  If that isn’t good enough advice for you to start making your own money online, I’ll add to that, that the site doesn’t need to look good at all.

I don’t advise you that you should build sites specifically for ranking in search engines, but you are going to get the best traffic from them.  People coming from the search engines have intent already, and the selling process is less complicated, if there is even any necessary.  So somewhere in between building sites for search engines and providing value to your visitors is where you should aim.

I’m setting the goal bar at $2000 per month for the year.  By the end of this year, I want to be making at least $2000 per month, if not more.  More is always more preferable.

Death of DiggityHost.com

I’ve failed to get DiggityHost.com to make enough money to cover it’s own cost over the past 3 years, so I’m dropping it from my portfolio of sites.  I’ll have another post that goes into more detail about this, but at this point, it’s pointless for me to continue trying to whip a dead horse into action.  The domain name and hosting business is just too saturated, and I’m not willing to put the effort out that it would take to build that business.  It’s just not worth the time.

Here’s to seeing your profits rise, and your feet remaining firmly planted on the ground,

Wayne

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There are a few reasons why I made the switch, most notably:

• I wanted more flexibility with my homepage
• I wanted something a little more engaging and nice to look at
• I wanted a few more widget areas
• I wanted a nice way to promote certain posts instead of watching them rotate out to page 2 and never be seen again
• I wanted nested comments
• I wanted to provide the ability for visitors to find more of my content easily

I think I have all that and more now with the theme I installed.  The theme is titled Arras and was written by Melvin Lee.  So far I’m quite pleased with it, but I’m still tightening things up a bit around here.  So far I haven’t found any real show-stoppers with this theme.

One of the downsides, if you even want to call it that, is that I’ll want to apply some image for each and every post now.  Not necessarily a bad thing at all since it makes the homepage look nice.  But it does cut into the amount of time it takes to build a post.  I’m not terribly worried about that though, the theme makes me happy to click about.  I’m not sure if that’s just me, or if that same feeling will transfer to my visitors as well.  Time will tell I guess.

All the comments are now threaded, which means you can respond to a comment itself instead of lumping your comment into the line of comments.  It’s my belief that this will encourage more people to comment and engage others that are also commenting here.

Finally, one last thing I’ve done also, WayneJohn.com is completely DoFollow.  My goal is to make every link on here a DoFollow link, and so far the plugin I’m using seems to do the trick.

Now that I have my new toy installed, maybe I can get some work done and keep my hands to myself.  Don’t count on it.

What do you think?  Kill me with your comments people!

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Something I really want to achieve is daily posting, and to help me achieve that while I build up the series I’m putting together, I’m going to start building more short posts to fill in the gaps between posts.  I’m also going to be doing more visiting and commenting on your blogs.

The problem I’ve had with doing short posts is that I feel it makes people antsy.  You all (mostly) want to learn about web development, and I want to deliver that.  However, because we’re on my personal blog, I feel it only appropriate to kick out a post that I feel is fun, and I should right?  Right.

Fun for me, and maybe if I’m lucky it’s fun for you too.

Status update on the web development series

I’m still building out the outline that the entire course will span.  There’s actually quite a bit to cover, and I even went to the bookstore to look at existing books on PHP, WordPress and “Building your website” to see how they’ve structured their chapters and such.  I made some notes and hope to have a complete outline of the course in a few weeks.

Then I will start writing it.  I’m doing a lot more planning this time around.

Another issue, and perhaps you can help me with this, is delivery.  I have been considering creating a sub-domain here that will focus solely on learning web development.  My thinking is that I should be taking a hard look at the value I’m giving, and if I’m going to spend the time to create a series that will show you how to build your own web site, using the tools I use and the tricks and tips that I’ve gathered over my 10+ years of my own web development career, then perhaps I should deliver it differently than with a post this week and post next week.

I’m going to take another look at Moodle to see if that is something I can leverage.  I don’t know if it will fit the bill, but I think I’d be smart to weigh my options here.

If you have some ideas, I’d love to hear them. In the mean time, expect more short posts to fill the empty spaces a bit.

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The end result of using  WordPress to update itself caused an error, and left a message in my admin area that stated “An automated WordPress update has failed to complete”.  After realizing that I should be using my hosts installer process instead, and performing the upgrade through my host, everything was file.  The install went off without a hitch, and I was back in action.  However, it left the message in dull yellow across the top of my administration area.

If you happen to see the same message in your admin area, and you know for sure that you’ve upgraded just fine, you can get rid of that message by deleting the .maintenance file that is located in the root of your website.

The .maintenance file seems to be an indicator file that is used by the WordPress install routine to indicate to itself that there was an issue upgrading, and the presence of that file tells WordPress to give the administrators the message stated above.  Sometimes, that file fails to be removed, and you’ll continue to get the message, even though you shouldn’t.

Simply deleting the file is all that is required to remove that message, and return your administrative interface to an error message free interface.  Assuming that was the only error of course.

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If you are thinking about refreshing your system with a new OS, or just want a fresh start, this article might help you avoid some problems.  There is nothing worse than getting to the other side of an operating system upgrade only to realize that you forgot something and will pay the price for forgetting.

I have been running XP for the longest time, and the stars are lining up right for me to take the jump to Windows 7.  I am a little more hesitant to upgrade since I once had Vista for about a week until I decided that it was complete crap and went back to XP.  When my system is down, I am not making money, so it’s very important to do this with as little downtime as possible.  Fortunately, I found that upgrading to Windows 7 was painless and actually quite enjoyable, and very quick!  A nice change from the Vista upgrade debacle.

If you are planning to upgrade, read on.  I am going to share some of my methods with you so that you to might have a good experience upgrading as well.

Before you install Windows 7

Before you buy or install Windows 7, I highly recommend running the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor to help determine if you’ll have any issues.  After clicking the link, you’ll see the download button on Microsoft’s page, just click that and you’re off and running.  Make sure that you have plugged all your external devices into your computer so that the Upgrade Advisor will know the devices exist and will be able to report back on the their compatibility.

The advisor process will take a few minutes, and while you’re waiting for it to finish, it is a great time to visit your PC manufacturer to see if they have any updated device drivers for any of your equipment.  It is also a good idea to take the extra time to build a folder with everything you need to support your hardware, and then burn the entire folder to CD.  With your device drivers on CD, you will be able to access them after the install of Windows 7.

AT A MINIMUM: Make sure you have a backup set of network device drivers.  With those, you can still hop online and find drivers for everything else…hopefully.

When I ran the advisor, it warned me that I need to have at least 16GB of free disk space.  That isn’t going to be a problem since I’m going to do a low-level wipe of everything before I install.  There were a number of other warnings for things I really do not care about, so there is nothing that will stop me from continuing this little journey.

Make notes for system devices and configuration settings

Another very good idea is to have a piece of paper and pencil handy.  I always forget a few things when I am going through the motions of upgrading, so instead of trying to rely on memory, I’m going to scan through my system for anything I need to copy or write down.

Here are a number of items that you might want to take note about before you perform the install:

• Backup your entire hard-drive to an external drive. Normally what I will do is keep all my data files (anything that I cannot simply recreate without an inordinate amount of time being spent) under a folder called “c:\data” so that I can backup all my work easily.  However, over the course of time, I have failed to contain everything to one folder (Windows loves “My Documents”, and I hate MS for that…), so I am just going to back up the entire hard-drive.  If you are unable to backup your entire hard drive, you will want to take extra time to ensure that you grab each and every data file.
• Take note of all your email addresses. I have about 10 email addresses, and each is set up in Microsoft Outlook.  I need to make notes on each email addresses pop, smtp servers, as well as the credentials used to access the email servers.  If I do not do this, I will fumble around trying to recall the credentials like I have the prior two refreshes.
• Account for specific applications settings. I had to perform backups of each database running in SQL Server, and copy them to external drive, as well as note the settings for each Remote desktop instance I connect to.  That financial software you are using, does it write to a file that is outside of your “normal” data storage area, say buried in numerous levels of folders?  Point here, make sure you take time to explore and scrutinize each application you run.
• Jot down your network settings for each network connection.
• Download drivers for each hardware component. My list included the following items, and the rest I expect to just work, but do not let my brazen, wild abandon stop you from doing a thorough job on your system.
  • Network cards
  • Video cards
  • DVD/CD-Rom
  • Modem
  • Printers
  • External devices like cams, etc…
• When in doubt, write it out. If there is anything else that you feel might be worth writing down, it is probably safe to say that you should write it down.  There’s nothing worse that getting to the other side of an operating system install to find that you lost something, or forgot to write something down and have to hack your own system to get everything back to normal.

With everything backed up, and all the notes you could ever want that pertain to your system, it’s time to inventory your software.  Installing a new operating system is a great time to start fresh, and get rid of the trash that you have accumulated over the years.

Inventory all the software you’ll want to install into Windows 7

Not all software will work on Windows 7.  If you are using any 16-bit applications, I understand that you might experience questionable results under the new Windows architecture.  If you currently have the applications installed, the advisor application should tell you if you will run into any problems.

For organizational reasons, you should make a list of each application you will want to install, and make sure you have the ability to install and use each one.  Do you have the disks to perform the install?  This is especially important for those of you that have downloaded software.  Did you take the time to burn an image of that downloaded software to CD?  Or did you make a backup of the software to an external device?

I lost my download of Spore last time I did this, and I was not terribly pleased.  As Spore is a game, I was not really all that upset about it either.  Point here, don’t let that happen to you, make sure you can install everything you will need to use.

Performing a clean install of Windows 7

When I do an upgrade like this, I will preference wiping out the old operating system before installing the new operating system.  By doing this, there will not be any settings or left-over “stuff” from the prior operating system, or from the upgrade process.

The install process itself is incredibly easy, and I found myself quite impressed with how quick it was too.  When I installed Windows 7, I inserted the disk into my CD tray, rebooted and forced my laptop to boot from the CD, causing the installer to start up.

I am not going to get into the nuances of the install process, but I will mention that in the beginning of the install process, you’ll get a chance to define where Windows 7 should be installed.  You will also be able to indicate if the drive should be formatted or not.  I choose to format my drive and then install the operating systems and subsequent applications.

It just feels better, and I will swear I get better performance from my computer by doing so.

Performing an upgrade to Windows 7

There is not much to say here other than to slip the disk in the drive and start the install process.  I might be making an assumption that all your applications will remain in tact and usable on the other end of the install, but I do believe that all those legacy settings that were made by the install and uninstall of all your prior applications will also carry forward as well.  It is for this reason that I preference a clean install.  But to each their own, right?

Post Windows 7 installation procedures

Once Windows 7 gives you back control of your system, it is time to get everything just the way you want it.  You took notes on everything and made backups of all your data files, so the effort is really about establishing the environment settings just the way you like them, and getting all your software reinstalled.

First though, you should make sure that all your devices are working properly.  To help with that, here is a list of steps that you should take to ensure everything is working properly:

1. Make sure you can connect to the Internet.  Install/update your network card drivers if you need to.
2. Access Windows Update and perform a scan – make sure you do this a couple times.  Many times when you go back, you will find that Windows update has found yet another patch for something.  Repeat this until Windows does not find anything to patch, and repeat after you have reloaded all your applications again, or if you’re feeling spunky, after each application is installed.
3. If you need to reboot, do it immediately.  Do not wait to see what else you can install, just take the hit and reboot when the computer says you should or when it needs to reboot.
4. Set your video, mouse and keyboard settings.
5. Check Device Manager for any devices that are not working properly.  If you need to install drivers for the device, now is the time to do so.
6. Begin installing your software.  Maybe check Windows Update after each install?
7. Copy your data from backup to a location that is usable.

You should be back in the game and have your system back to normal at this point.  Now might be a good time to explore all that Windows 7 provides.

Notes and observations of my own install of Windows 7

This entire process generally takes me an entire day to perform, so I favor doing this on weekends where I know I will not be interrupted.  However,  this time I decided that I’d take two weekdays to perform my install and upgrade.  At the end of the first evening, I had backed up everything (over 350GB of data), taken the notes I needed to take, installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 (took about an hour! Yay!) configured and updated Windows 7, installed MS Office and Visual Studio.

The second evening I was able to get the remaining applications installed and configured, as well as re-establish my Data folder where I keep everything “data”.

So far I’m impressed with Windows 7, and hope to not have to uninstall it like I had to uninstall Vista.  Some applications just did not work right under Vista, like Microsoft’s premier development suite, Visual Studio!  Vista killed Microsoft’s own applications, and that was disturbing enough to me to cause me to revert to XP.

So far, everything seems quite fine under Windows 7.  I hope your install of Windows 7 goes just as smooth, and is just as enjoyable as my own experience was.

More Resources

Visit the Windows 7 Homepage
Still undecided? Try a Test drive of Windows 7
Read about Windows 7 features in Engadget’s review of Windows 7
Buy a copy of Windows 7

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I knew that the numbers had spiked in November and would be lower in December.  After all, the only thing driving the sites I’m operating is search traffic.  As the search traffic fluctuates, so will my income from these sites, but I won’t be changing a thing.  Here’s why.

They’re covering their own costs, and making improvements might change that for the better, or for the worse.  Point is, I don’t know which way it will go, so as long as I’m unable to tell, I’m leaving well enough alone and working on new things.  It’s that same ideal that will give me added time to do more here on the blog this year.

Anyway, here is what happened for the month of December:

Google – $98.83
eBay – $716.89
Chitika – $38.86
others – $9.69

A grand total of $864.27 which is a 57% decrease from the prior month.  Affiliate business is a fickle business.

When I looked at some of the stats for the entire year, I kinda shocked myself.  Some of these numbers are just incredible.  Check this out:

Google – $635.33 for an even 8,000 clicks.
eBay – $4,112.31.  There were 135,909 clicks sent and 2,954 bids made on eBay products.  Total gross sales were $122,438.23 and included a few cars.

This graph is also telling a few stories too.

You might not see it right off, but the blue line indicates the number of clicks on a given day.  The yellow displays the amount earned.  You should see that in the beginning, I was flooding eBay with traffic that didn’t necessarily pay off.  After I lowered my click amounts, I started to make more money.

I can say the decrease in clicks is all due to eBay switching over to a “Quality” payment model near August and September.  As will be the case for most of us, when we start delving into affiliate marketing, we’ll spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make those first few dollars.  With persistence though, you’ll eventually find what is necessary for the niche you’re playing in, and things should start to come together for you.

If they don’t, perhaps your time is better spent on a different project.  These things do take time to build though.  Not only do you probably have a lot to learn (I know I did, and still do!), but you have to garner traffic too.  Neither is just going to happen overnight.

With persistence, water can cut rock.  That’s all anything in this world takes.  Persistence.

Until next month!  May your traffic be high and converting!

Wayne

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I had turned them off since after the initial “hurrah” of a new post, the only comments that tend to trickle in are those from spammers…but!  There are a few that are valid and good comments, so I decided to give it another go and see what happens.  So far, I think I have only received spam, but I still need to sort through those new comments.

In addition to turning the comments back on, I’ve also added the ability to rate a comment.  The idea is that eventually I’ll modify the ratings to hide particular comments that seem to just be completely negative in ratings.  While this could potentially open up a completely new set of problems, I thought I’d give it a try anyway to see what happens.

So with the new archive page in place, you should be able to troll a lot of my older posts and leave your own comments there too.  I think if you do enough digging and searching around here, you might find a couple posts that have risen in PR over time, and might be a great place to leave a comment with a link to your site.

As for the ratings, each and every comment is now ratable.  If you see a comment from someone you like, give them a thumbs up.  If you see some spam that you don’t like, give it a thumbs down.  Don’t agree with someone, thumbs down.  Agree?  Thumbs up.  Easy right?

I’ll still monitor each and every comment that passes through here, I don’t think I’ll ever allow this blog to get to the point where the spammers have taken control, but this is a great opportunity to get your links on a few of my “better” pages.

It’s up to you to find them.

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Actually, the theme I’m using didn’t even come with an archive.php page, so I created a new page and added a new plug-in as well.

I decided to roll with the Clean Archives Reloaded plugin written by a Viper007Bond.

Installation was really easy, and I like the collapsing JavaScript functionality it came with.

Now that I have this in place, I can take inventory of what I’ve written before, and it will help define what I don’t need to write about, but what I should be referencing in the new project for this year.

Onwards and upwards!

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Boring.

How about building a PHP site from scratch?

Nah.

Alright then, what if I took WordPress and made a porn site with it?

HELL YEAH!

So here’s what I’m really thinking.  You guys want to learn how to build a website, I want it to be fun and entertaining for everyone involved.  Last year I wanted to build a “Glutten free” site that would showcase recipes and products that people who have this dietary need could shop for.  I don’t find that very entertaining.  Nor was I able to complete that particular series, so screw that I say.

Instead of that, I’m going to be tapping a completely different market and creating a photo site using WordPress as the core of it.  From concept to development to launch and then on to marketing and monetizing, I’ll describe each and every step I’m taking along the way so that you can follow along and do each step as they come out.

In the end of it all, I’ll get a new website that I wouldn’t mind supporting, and you get a new web site for yourself too, or several ideas, tips and tricks along the way.  I am also planning on making everything downloadable so you could just grab the entire project files and do whatever you want with it.

The website you build for yourself doesn’t have to be porn, nor does mine, but I will be focusing on an image based site, and it will be mildly risque.  I hope it makes the whole experience more enjoyable for everyone involved, I know the guys will like it, I hope the girls do too.   More on the specifics will come in a later post.

Why go with WordPress?

I decided I wanted to create an image/photo based site since anyone can pick up a camera and take photos.  Anyone.  That makes the photo itself a great central focus for the website, in my opinion.  Also, I’ve found that image based sites tend to do very well with traffic, so there should be a lot of visitors hitting an image site.

I also decided to go with WordPress instead of actually hand-coding an entire site due to time.   One of the biggest challenges I’ll face is the extremely slow pace that I’ll have to take to document my steps and provide additional ideas and thoughts about what I’m doing, or why I’m doing what I’m doing.

I will probably dive into a little php through the course, but really I wanted to try to keep it available to absolute beginners too.  Another reason I chose to go with WordPress.  There will be some up and down in terms of complexity from post to post, but I know you can handle that just fine.  WordPress is a great tool, and in many, many cases, it’s all you really need to build a great site.  It doesn’t do everything, but it does exactly what we need it to do for this project.

So, I guess I need a camera

You might laugh, but I don’t have a camera, so that’s one thing I’m going to need to change.  I can’t create a photo site without a camera!  It’s OK though, because I don’t need to have the camera right away, I’ll need it by summertime.  I’ve got plenty of time for that later, as there is plenty to cover before we actually start building the site.

Summertime in California…I bet you could guess what I’m going to focus the site on.

Throw in your topics for the syllabus in the comments below if you have any special requests.  I’m going to brainstorm the full scope and topics of the project over the next few days so there is plenty of time to influence the topics I’ll cover.  I have a few drafted posts waiting in the queue that I might touch up and send out in the mean time, but I’m getting revved up to go full board on this.  Are you ready to build a website?

I can’t hear you!  Are you ready?

Alrighty then, let’s get this party started people!

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