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The Two-Hour Website
As part of my activities for EarnMoreThanBefore, I believe it's necessary to be able to build a website quickly. So far, I can have a website with some content up and running in two hours.
Here are some the attributes I consider important:
Build Quickly
What's the point in a website if you takes you several days to build? You may have missed the opportunity by then. Plus it's taking time out of revenue generating activities you could be doing. It's important to realise that building a website doesn't generate revenue in itself.
Range of Themes
I want to be able to pick visually-eyecatching and functional themes appropriate to the content and direction of the sites. Potentially each site could require a different theme, however for simplicity's sake, I can imagine re-using the same theme many times as long as it's appropriate.
Little Customisation
I want the sites to work out-of-the-box. I'll configure it by clicking checkboxes or adding text for boilerplate, but I've no interesting in coding html.
Upgradeability
The sites need to be upgradeable. If there's new functionality out, e.g. a new social-networking service that I want to integrate my sites to, then I want to be able to add that module to the sites.
Easy Maintenance
If an upgrade is needed, then I want to be able to roll that upgrade out across all appropriate sites in one go. I don't want to have to download a module, upload, extract, install, configure, etc for each module on each site. Otherwise I'd quickly lose the hours in the day to maintenance.
Functionality
The sites require the facility to post content of any media type, including desktop content editing rather than just online editing. This should include allowing comments, comment subscription, RSS feeds and some will require a forum. They'll also require easy integration to Google Analytics, sitemap submission and automatic pinging. The more automated I can get the content submission routine, the more time I'll save.
The sites also require the ability to post adverts and rotating banners.
Why not use blogger.com or wordpress.com?
Doing it this way, I'm free of restrictions from blogger.com and similar content hosting sites. That's my choice. I can see content hosting sites working better for some than others.
Agility
Overall, I need an agile approach and that's important throughout this. I'm not sure what EarnMoreThanBefore will look like in a year's time, but I am convinced I'll be closer to the £10k per month aim. The ability to quickly build quality web sites are part of the acceptable activities towards that aim.
The main thrust of the article was about how it's necessary to be able to build a website quickly, but in a replicable and maintainable manner. 2 hours was how long it took me when I built a new site just before writing the article.
I've since built another two sites and it's now taking less than two hours per site. Even with the low-maintenance options that I've chosen, there are still some elements that have to be applied to every site. Maybe when I've got to 20 sites, I'll re-evaluate whether the current technology stack supporting the sites is the right one for what I want to achieve. By then, I'll have had more experience of what works and doesn't work. More specifically, I'll understand more about how much time I have to spend tinkering with a site rather than writing content and/or generating revenue.
Other sites: Award Sounds, Audio Cloth, EarnMoreThanBefore, Awesome Amps
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