Your Thinking of Building a Website

Your browsing the Internet looking for information about creating a website. You have read a few blogs about it. Maybe skimmed a few forums. You think you understand the concept: Create a website, write some content for it, slap some advertisements on it, and that is it.

That is what I thought when I came across the concept for the first time too. I stumbled on a web page describing the concept of creating a revenue generating website. Three hours later I decided that I was going to create a website.

How Long Does it Take?

What I did not know was how much time it takes to create a website design. And how much time it takes to write the initial content. I read somewhere that you need at least 10 pages of content before you go live. Otherwise the website looks bare. So I made quick calculations in my head. 2 hours per page * 10 hours = 20 hours. Plus 3 days to create the website: the layout, logo, choose some colors etc. Total estimated time 20 hours + ( 3 x 8 ) hours = 44 hours. Just over one 40 hour work week.

I had an advantage because I was familiar with HTML. A website was not a black box to me. I knew the basics. The only problem was that I never used Dreamweaver (website creation software) before and I new nothing about CSS. After reading a few articles I figured that Dreamweaver and CSS are a must to create a proper website. So I added another day to my estimate to get familiar with Dreamweaver and CSS. My final estimate was 44 hours + 8 hours = 52 hours from nothing to a website.

That is a lot of time. Since I have a full time job I could only work on weekends. If I were to work for 10 hours a week then my website would take over 5 weeks to complete. I did not want to wait that long. So around Christmas I took a week off work and forced myself to work everyday until it is done.

Building the website

The first 2 days were slow with little progress. Getting familiar with Dreamweaver, CSS was tedious. But after a 10 hours of messing around I got the hang of it. After that I could begin to concentrate on creating instead of learning. For a week straight I built the website. First the general layout, then the logo, and finally the individual content filled pages.

The content pages are the worst part. Especially since I was forced to write them regardless of what mood I was in. I needed to be done before work started again. Days passed and I sat at the computer creating and writing.

50 Hours Later

As you can see on my spreadsheet it took me 50 hours to complete. After 50 hours I had a website with content. Something I could throw on the website host. Almost bang on with my estimate of 52 hours.

But then came the little tweaks. The touch ups. Change the colors, a little rewriting of the text. Move a image over a few pixels to the right, change the font size. Just tweaking and adjusting. No big steps, just little shuffles. There was always more to do, always some little change. Some little adjustment before going to bed. Let me warn you that these adjustments take forever, literally. Still doing them today.

I was finding to my horror that I was not really done the website. I would leave the computer and then I would get an idea to change something. This kept happening over and over again.

26 Hours Later

According to the spreadsheet it was another 26 hours of this pesky tweaking. Only after a total of 76 hours was I happy enough to state that the website is ‘complete’.

Of course I was not done-done. Never will be really done. A website is a growing entity. It always requires attention. There is always more to do. But I was at the stage that I could upload it to host and make it live. From then on it would only be a matter of keeping it up to date.

How Long Will Your Website Take?

How long will it take you to create website from scratch? If you are building a content based website with around 10 pages. And your abilities are like mine (a little HTML) then I would guess 50 hours of initial creation and then 25 hours of touch ups. In 75 hours you will have a completed website. Then all that is left is infinite hours maintaining it.

Actual Stats From The Website Used

If you are a webmaster you probably do not have a balance sheet. You do not need one. What would you put on it? What would you put as your assets and liabilities?

Of course it is possible to start being a webmaster with absolutely no assets. OK, actually you do need one asset. A public library card. Go the library, use one of the computers and sign up for a free online blog (like Blogger). Everyday you go to the library and write your blog. Completely free and no big assets.

Assets

I am sure that there are a few blogs out there created from a free access computer at the library, but most web masters use their own computer, at their own desk, and on their own chair. There you go – three assets right there. Computer, table, chair.

Next you probably do not want to use a free online hosting service. They look unprofessional and your domain name will be tom.freehosting.com. So you register a domain name for 1 year. And because you are not sure you really want to be a webmaster, you sign up for a six month hosting service. There you go again – more assets. You have prepaid a years worth for a domain name and six months for a hosting service. These are assets that you now own.

Liabilities

Now for the liabilities. For a month straight you slave away long into the night punching away at your keyboard spewing out Hemingway quality content. Nobody is paying you. You are doing it for free. But it is still work and you expect to be paid back one day. It is like you are giving your website a loan. One day when the website is making money it will have to pay you back. This is a liability to the website as wages owed to you. After a few months the website will start making lots of money. As soon as it does it will have to pay its debts. Namely the one to you. Your salary.

Equity

You own the website.

After it has paid you and if there is still some money left over that will be your equity. Equity=assets-liabilities. The amount the website is worth to you. If you could sell all the assets and pay off all the liabilities the amount left over would go into your pocket.

Most businesses when they start the equity is not a pretty sight. This is especially the case for all webmasters. You put a little bit of money into the required tools (computer, desk, chair) and then a lot of time into building the website. Once it is built you still have nothing. You have spent money and you have spent time. But you still have nothing. Just a whole bunch of megabytes sitting on some server’s hard drive.

Only after the visitors start coming and click on ads and buy your products do you recoup your initial investment. Only then does your negative equity begin to slowly turn around and begin its climb into the positives.

As I write this my equity is still deep in the negative.

Actual Stats From The Website Used, There is a HOW TO in the Post, What YOU Should Do

 The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.  Everybody knows that.  But what I did not know, and just recently discovered, is that the price of traffic is also eternal vigilance.

As you can seen from the website traffic data page so far the traffic is coming very slowly.  At the beginning there was basically no traffic.  Then I started to post on a forum.  Each post ends with my signature which is a link to the website.  Every time I made a post, a few hours later my traffic would go up.

The problem is that the traffic does not stay up.  If I miss a day of posting then the traffic goes down.  Post then get visitors.  No post, no visitors.  Eternal vigilance – post everyday.

The website is still at its infancy and no traffic has come by search engines or word of mouth.  I can deem some interesting information with the threads I have created on a forum.  Since all my traffic has come from them.

So far I have started a total of 6 threads.  By taking the number of people that visited the website (147) by the number of posts (6) we can see that every post is worth almost 24 visitors.  This is sad.  Because so far it looks like I would need to create 41 threads a day to get 1000 visitors a day.  Unfortunately to make this possible I would need a team of a thousand monkeys typing a thousand words.

This means that the forum I am creating threads at is too small.  Not enough views.  Looking back at the last few days of my posts I can see that they have been viewed 851 times.  Out of all the people viewing my threads 17% of them click on the signature line.

All the above can be summarized as: for every thread created on a forum my website receives 17 visitors per 100 views.

Therefore to reach my goal of a 1000 visitors per day I need 5882 thread views.  Or to start 10 threads each receiving at least 588 views.  Still a lot but getting closer to being possible on large forums.

Two conclusions can be made:

1. By posting on big forums I will still need to be vigilant and post every day, but at least I will be closer to 1000 visitors a day and not 15.
2. I need to find other ways to get traffic.

Data used to for calculations:

• Unique visitors: 67
• Visitors: 147
• Threads created: 6
• Clicked on Signature: 23
• Number Views in forum: 851

Note: The only way to explain the discrepancy between ‘unique visitors’ (67) and ‘clicked on signature’ (23) is to assume that some of the visitors that clicked on the signature emailed a link of the website to their friends.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used, Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this