My assumption today is that you have an idea of what you want to do and are ready to get your website built. Great! However, if you are like me you may tend to get lost in the design or look-and-feel of your site's layout. Advice of the day - whatever you do stop this behavior! Why? Because this is the kind of thing that will waste hours of your time. 'But, but, but', you say, 'I want my site to look great.' Yes, everyone does. However, it is one of the single most time consuming tasks especially if you are not a graphic designer.
Based on my own abilities to do graphic and text layouts I would say that my efficiency rating is about 5-10 to 1 - meaning that what takes me 5-10 hours to do graphically I can do in 1 hour of article writing, site text and links. Think about that - if I build my own site I may be spending 20 hours on the layout and 2 to 4 hours on the content. Now you tell me which is more important!
Regardless of my argument - what is important is getting the content out on the web before anything else. Many miss this point all together. I could, for example, create 5 articles, 3-4 intro and about pages, and a site map and get it loaded on a new domain in a day. I could also start the first blog entry as well. This content would not need a layout and could just be a basic CSS XHTML layout as you can see in the CSS Zen Garden site without CSS skin and with CSS skin. That way the search engines can immediately begin spidering my content. I do not need to worry about my visitors yet since the site is new and very few will find it in the next few weeks. However, now I have the luxury to work on the layout and start building links without trying to complete the entire site first.
Get your content out there first! You'll be glad you did!
Based on my own abilities to do graphic and text layouts I would say that my efficiency rating is about 5-10 to 1 - meaning that what takes me 5-10 hours to do graphically I can do in 1 hour of article writing, site text and links. Think about that - if I build my own site I may be spending 20 hours on the layout and 2 to 4 hours on the content. Now you tell me which is more important!
Regardless of my argument - what is important is getting the content out on the web before anything else. Many miss this point all together. I could, for example, create 5 articles, 3-4 intro and about pages, and a site map and get it loaded on a new domain in a day. I could also start the first blog entry as well. This content would not need a layout and could just be a basic CSS XHTML layout as you can see in the CSS Zen Garden site without CSS skin and with CSS skin. That way the search engines can immediately begin spidering my content. I do not need to worry about my visitors yet since the site is new and very few will find it in the next few weeks. However, now I have the luxury to work on the layout and start building links without trying to complete the entire site first.
Get your content out there first! You'll be glad you did!
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