h Webmaster, What Have You Got Yourself Into!?

By Ruth Marlene Friesen
Posted Thursday, December 2, 2004

When you first try to design a small web site you don't realize what you are getting yourself into. Unless you have specific web design training, I bet you were not fore-warned. Let me brace you.

Learning and remembering the HTML codes is easy compared to what comes after your site is up.

1. Checking your links

Besides uploading your pages and making sure the links work, you need to schedule regular checking or else get someone else (usually for a fee) to notify you if they need to be fixed.

2. Fixing your links

Most of the time fixing links is simple. Sometimes something has gone wrong, and you need to ask help you sort out the mess. Desperate to have your business pages functional as quick as possible, you may stay up late to re-build an HTML section or several pages.

3. Submitting to search engines

This is how you announce to the cyber world you exist. but often you must re-submit again every month, and you'll continually find other engines and directories. When you revamp your site, you must start all over again.

4. Writing ads and posting them

This is marketing, and if you are on a shoestring you will need to do all this yourself. Daily and weekly, over and over. This aspect of a website alone could keep you busy most of your time.

5. Tracking ads

So you only spend time and money where advertising is most effective, you will need to track or use software to track your ads. This can be automated, but it takes time to learn to set up.

6. Creating banners; putting up affiliate banners

Something fun to learn; sooner or later you will want to exchange banners for more advertising, or sign up to refer people to an affiliate or 3 - or more!

7. Adding content or new products

People won't come back to your site if nothing new appears or happens there. Therefore, you'll add more and more content, or write new ebooks, or create other products. Like when?!

8. Tweaking

Don't laugh. If you subscribe to helpful ezines, you continually learn about little ways to improve your web site's design. You'll often be tweaking it a bit here, and a bit there.

9. Fixing tables and forms

For unexplained reasons tables and forms go out of shape, or need to be revised. Unless you delegate this aspect of your work, it will eat up time sooner or later.

10. Starting an ezine to build relationships

Before long you will see the best advertising is to be an authority figure in your field. You'll want to keep in touch with past customers and those who window-shopped at your web site but need to be invited back. You might just write articles like this and let your resource box do your advertising, but if you start an ezine - watch out - it will take over your life.

11. Corresponding with new friends and clients

If your website and ads will make you many friends and clients they will want to chat with you and get some business questions answered. It takes time to answer them all even if you are a people- person and have the gift of gab. Especially then!

12. Dealing with floods of email!

Some email is truly junk, but it takes a while to sort and organize your system for recognizing and dealing with it. Still, some days it will hit you like an avalanche.

Am I trying to discourage you? By no means! It's an exciting life. I find considerable fulfillment in it. But if you are just starting out, you might want to make sure you have room in your life for all this. Do allow yourself enough time to learn. Don't expect to understand it all and be rolling in money by next Friday.

Unless you are one exceptionally coordinated team, a committee will take twice as long. Take time to learn it all yourself. All this knowledge is going to be very useful to your business career.

About the Author
Ruth Marlene Friesen, Editor of A Journal of God's Provision - Digest. Does God care about your internet business? Yes He does! Watch miracles at (http://journal-provision.hypermart.net/) Author: mailto:ruth@journal-provision.hypermart.net