Building Web Sites for Profit and Fun – a Money Making Tutorial Intro.

There was once a time when business moved with the pace of the locals, generally slow and steady. Today, business must keep up with the world and the fast pace of the internet. It’s a fascinating prospect and a momentous movement. But it can be very challenging and scary at times as well. More and more, it seems, success is dependent on the effective and efficient utilization of the internet. Throughout my sojourn in this digital realm, I have run across many who have an aptitude and a desire to build effective websites for profit but really don’t know the finer points of making a success out of it. So here I am going to expound and share some secrets I have learned over the ten years I have been doing this.

There are three elements that are essential and necessary in order to create effective websites for profit.

• Tools
• Knowledge
  • References
  • Research
• Ability

Over the course of this series, I will go over all of the above in detail and expound upon each, giving the tidbits and nuggets I have learned over the years from trial, error, research, and experimentation, hopefully saving you much needed time in getting up to speed in web building. I am not going to go into too much detail, in this series, about internet applications and such. This is going to mostly be about design, layout, and the basic fundamentals of web page building.

The goal here will be to empower you with the knowledge, tools, and resources to be able to build at least the front ends to small websites ready for the corporate world. There is almost an art to building such sites, but there is a lot of science as well. This series should be able to provide you with a good dose of both.

So with that being said, here are the segments of the series (this will become live links as the sections are filled in)

1. Tools of the Trade
2. Relevant References
3. Relying on Research
4. The Process

You may be asking yourself “What about ability? Aren’t you going to talk about that too?” Well, not really and here is a short story to illustrate why.

Several years ago, I was attending a university dedicated to computer science. It had a truly unique approach in that it was almost entirely hands on and group oriented. Towards the end of the first quarter there, I had had the chance of observing many of the students there and their varying degrees of progression. I was talking to the instructor of one of our group project classes and we were discussing why some of the students grossly accelerated in ability while the remainder tended to trudge along in mediocrity. We came to the conclusion that ability came from three things:

• Time spent (and this was the main one, the other two feed from it)
• The ability to tinker with a concept or technology and get it to work
• The art of debugging

So really ability comes from time spent doing it. Now I could do a series (and probably will) on tinkering and debugging, but in the end, nothing I can say will replace experience and time spent doing it.

So buckle down and let’s get to work!