eAction

I have web designing on my brain these days. Heavy duty! I’m renovating my own three sites, plus one for a mission organization, and starting a new one for another ministry. Plus, I’m helping two friends with theirs; one to revise all the pages a bit, and the other up from scratch, so to speak.

I’m thankful now for all the things I’ve learned by trial and error over the past seven years, but it occurs to me that I should make a list of the things I wish someone had taught me at the beginning. It would have saved me heaps of time, and got me ahead faster. Sometimes when we pass along such lessons, someone else can be spared many delays and frustrations. So hold on while I compile my list.

1. I should have avoided the wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) kind of web design programs and gone straight into learning basic html coding. I thought at first I wasn’t smart enough to learn that coding language. Dumb line of thinking. I have much more freedom and liberty to try new design features now that I know the basic web design techniques. Like learning English, you can always add more to your vocabulary later. What appeared to be easy-peasy programs just delayed my true progress and skills.

2. Get a domain name. They were like $60 to $200 back when I began, so I couldn’t afford them, and fiddled with free hosting packages the first couple of years. I began to read that your web site wouldn’t be treated as a real business if it was on a free host, and chaffed, but once I had a domain and saw the advantages, I knew it was true. Now it is possible to get a domain registration for under $5 or $10 a year.

3. It is possible to learn everything I want to know about designing a web site online. There are plenty of tutorial sites. But I should have scheduled myself a learning hour - even a half hour on a daily basis from the beginning. Then I’d be up on the latest design skills all the time, and by now, I’d know everything!

4. One smart thing I did was join up with the affiliate program at SiteSell. It’s called the 5 Pillar Program, and is free to join. It provides nearly weekly emails with great advice on the planning of the content of the site. That’s where I learned about the free Masters’ Courses. First they came out as 5-day email courses, now they are available as e-books. Those have been priceless in learning how to brainstorm for themes, how to find out what people are looking for, and how the competition is - or is not meeting that need. Then also, how to use words that persuade and sell to get people to do what I most want them to do on my site. (These courses are available now on my site for free downloads; http://BouquetofEnterprises.biz/B/MastersCourses.shtml)

5. There are steps to learn in how to get a site listed in the search engines, and on directories, and how to exchange links with similar sites. Again, these were lessons scattered through my self-training years. But it would have been nice if someone had guided me through that earlier, and helped me to stay away from classifieds and surfing programs. They ate up valuable time that I could have used to create still more web sites!

Hmm. Maybe these five points would be enough for a short course? I wonder how steep the learning curve is for that.