3 Guidelines for Starting a Website

May
2007
08

posted by on The Net

11 comments

Ok well starting a website or blog is not that easy, but if you follow some simple guidelines you can have a fairly decent website that people will want to come back to. After thinking about all of the steps in creating a website I have come up with three guidelines you should follow if you want your website to become popular.

Keep it Updated – If you just put some content on a website and don’t update for months most likely people will not come back. If I go to a site and I think it’s interesting I bookmark it and come back and check it out every few days. If I see that the site has not been updated in a couple of weeks I take it off my bookmarks and usually do not return. So updating is key, especially since you can send out news releases about your latest content and people can subscribe to your RSS feed to see when you have updated.

Make the site something you are interested in – It is a lot easier to write and keep a site updated if it is something you are interested in. All of my site’s topics are things that I like or I’m interested in. That is why it is not a hard thing for me to keep them updated. Just because a topic is popular does not mean it has to be what your website is going to be about. Make your site about things you like and you will enjoy working on it.

Get Your Own Domain – I RARELY go to websites that are hosted on free services like Tripod, AOL, and Geocities. It really does not cost that much to register a domain and get some hosting. You can get domains for around $6-$10 a year and a lot of hosting packages are only $5 a month! Anyone can afford that and a lot of these hosting companies have free website builders if you do not know that much about making websites. If the hosting is to much, make sure you get a domain. You can have the domain pointing to your free hosting until you get enough money to purchase hosting. Believe me having your own dot com is a nice thing!

Hopefully this list will help anyone who is starting a new website and help them make their site look official and maybe even make them some money! Good Luck!

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  • http://www.oubipaws.org Nick

    You are not the only one – I can’t stand these free sites. Almost everyday somebody ends up in digg and it’s a Blogspot blog running a gazillion adsense ads. Why not spend 10 dollars for a domain!? Always been a confusing thing to me.

    -N

  • http://mypcrig.com Justin

    Great advice!

    People don’t have the know how on how to host their own website. So they look to these free sites, that makes it easy to do so and they don’t have to worry about it.

  • Moulinneuf

    “I RARELY go to websites that are hosted on free services like Tripod, AOL, and Geocities.”

    Not everyone as the know how or a good mentor when they start , I thought that with the websites that you have that you would look and see if people did not have the same interests in those directory and invite them to participate on your sites.

    Most people are programmed to think that Free (gratis) is good , if you don’t invite them and show them otherwise , how exactly are they supposed to know better ?

    All good advice , but that last part sounded a tad bit elitist , or its just because I have a really bad Geocities website from when they where still called only Geocities ;-)

    I can confrm that it only brought me shame and laughs as soon as people found out I had one ;-)

  • http://www.businesstwins.com Business Twins

    Another tip..Find someone that you know or meet someone online that will help you out. I started blogging not to long ago, and I had no clue what I was doing. I got the basics, but didn’t even know what plug-ins I needed and how to even work the basics. But after a while I got the hang of it, plus it didn’t hurt that people in the blogging community are all really helpful.

    I also don’t see why people don’t buy a domain name or hosting. If you are using a free service in my opinion, it will only discredit your site even more. I don’t think I read any blogs that are on freehosting websites.

  • http://www.businesstwins.com Business Twins

    There are a lot of people out there that don’t know about computers or even use them, except for surfing the internet, instant messaging, and email.

    If I didn’t have a friend that was in computers, I don’t think I would even be sitting here today. He showed me how to use FTP, and the basics of HTML and all that other cool stuff I still don’t really know about haha.

    But the point is, free services are out there to help people get started.

  • http://rileycentral.net Damien

    Great short post. I think there’s much more to offer the newbie, but you get them started in the right direction.

    While it’s not the choice for many bloggers, I might add that learning the facets of Technorati is a very strategic way to develop readership.

  • http://www.kingnomar.com Nomar

    I agree on the own domain thing. I also rarely visit blogspot accounts

  • http://www.rbmods.com BigMan

    Good post, reminds me that I have to fix a domain name to my blog :)

    Now Geocites might be laughed at now but when I started those suckers were the best thing on the free market, a whole 2mb accounts and if you got “featured” they gave you a whole whooping 5mb LOL

  • http://www.bobbuskirk.com Bob Buskirk

    Yea geocities was awesome back in the day, I had a dragonball z fan site on there!

  • http://rileycentral.net Damien

    I don’t think the key point is that blogspot blogs CAN’T be good. But as a general rule, if one cares about others reading ones posts, one will self-host.

    Blogspot is firewalled at all public schools K-12. That’s just one example of a big audience to be missing if you want to be taken seriously. Besides that, most people who frequent blogs and/or write them know the look of a blogspot free site as opposed to a self-host blog. The stigma is there as much as you want to deny it.

    I have a few blogspots on my favorites list because they have great content. If a self-hosted blog had shite for content, I’d dump them just as fast and I keep blogspots if they have great content (though I have no idea why they choose to remain blogspots).

    Anyway, sorry about the book, I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I read your post. I guess the rhetorical question becomes:

    “If I care about my audience, wouldn’t I use the most accessible and inviting platform available?” Especially when self-hosting is getting so easy.

    My 2 cents from Rileycentral

  • http://www.zerotomed.com Jacob

    I think the problem that most people make is that they do not make a website on something they like. Unless your goal is to sell the site immediately, make it on something you like.