Well, in these tutorials, I’ll explain how you can start your own blog/website, how to analyze it, how to optimize it, how to update it, how to market it, how to make profit out of it and how to make it a successful project!
Either you are a student, a university professor, a beginner web developer/designer, a business man, a flowers’ passionate, a restaurant chef or what ever else, and you want to start a website/blog to promote your business, your passion, or inform people about the dangers of global warming or the doom’s day prophecy, or help people rise money for their education, or what ever goal you have, I will help you on developing and delivering the best website/blog you can ever build!
And what is fantastic is that this tutorial is free and all you have to do is once you started your website/blog, the only thing I ask you in exchange, is that you write a blog post or article about these tutorials and my website, but that is optional and up to you.
Well, if you get through difficulties and you have questions, just post them in the comments section of the related tutorial, and you’ll get the reply very soon. To follow the tutorials and their comments, just subscribe to my RSS feeds or subscribe by e-mail (on the left side panel of Gibni).
Well, first and most important thing to do, is to decide what you want to do, and define your goals and trace a plan. Almost everything in this level is to be done on paper (real one).
List your goals, by asking yourself, what are the things you want to achieve by the project, the immediate goals and long term ones.
List and relist, and arrange them, then sort your goals by time, ie. put the ones you need to achieve first on the top of the list. But be careful to be realist, think like this that if you want to change the world, you should start by changing yourself and your surrounding.
So, now that you have sorted them by time, sort them also by toughness, put the easiest ones in top.
Now that you know what you want to achieve, we will proceed to the next level, which is, how to achieve it. Go to your favorite search engine, and type in the keywords you think match best with your project. You will get some results and websites which have almost the same topic(s) as you, visit them, and see how they present their content. Get a better idea of what you might present that would be new and would attract more visitors.
Well, now, comes a little bit difficult part, decide what technology use to develop and implement your website/blog. I personally would recommend that you use PHP as the main language of development for your site. Because PHP is really easy to learn and to implement and it’s cheap on the maintenance side and even on the servers and hosting side.
Now, to simplify your work, I recommend you use some CMS/ PORTAL/ or similar content management web application. Right now, I’m using WORDPRESS for Gibni, and as you can see, it’s not a normal blog, I transformed it to act as a CMS (Content Management System) too. So, now it’s up to you to find out what best matches your requirements, search about WordPress, PhpNuke, vBulltin, Joomla, PHPBB and so on…
Now, start to draw a rough draft of the design of your site/blog, from how you want the overall look of the site, if you want any columns, if yes, how many, which side? Think about the header, about the main content, about the footer. Then, think about what colors you want to implement and try to find the best colors that match together, there are websites and software which suggest best color combinations. Then if you use a CMS or web application like wordpress, search and look for available themes. Like this, you’ll get a better idea of different possible designs and styles.
No, it’s to you to be creative and create a new design (if you wish to have a unique blog/site)
Remember, to be successful, all you need is creativity and a bit of knowledge and junk!
All the tools are available to help you, so just make an effort and be creative.
In the next part, we will review some design tips and few examples. So now, you have to go out and get enough knowledge and decide on the basics as said above. Take your time.
