Advice for starting my first serious website

Hello all,

I'm a student about to graduate and I am bursting with ideas for a website that I want to create.

My website will be targeting a certain market which I dont want to say at the current point in time, but the site will have articles, product reviews and other relevant features.

I plan to start off by creating a CMS with forums to start an online community and slowly gain popularity and develop an e-commerce division of the site as well.

I would like to ask for advice on things I need to look out for, things I should do, things shouldn't do and anything to get my site up!

I will value all your comments and any wisdom you can offer.

TIA=Thanks in Advanced!

Edit: I want to also add that my website mission is to provide the best content and be the best community in the topic area. My goals are to reach a PR of 6 or more, and earn a Google Adsense cheque every month.

 

From a content standpoint just pick a topic that are interested in writing about and write. It will be a lot easier to write about topics you are really interested in. Make sure you have a few articles posted before you publish your site. This way your first visitors will be able to get a good idea of the content on your site.

An easy to configured CMS that I like and use is Movable Type.

Other than that just have fun with the site and promote like crazy.

 

Tia, sounds like you have already put some good thought into this and, in my opinion, have a good plan. I think building a community first is a great way to start...not the easiest, but a great way to start. Once you have a community it is much easier to "monetize" it later, especially if you have plans and blueprints to follow. Good luck.

 

reh, yes i'm fanatical about the subject, and i think it'll be hard to write at first but once it get the flow writing regularly should become a good habit.

movable type was a cgi based blog, i think i'll be trying to use a php based package that has the capability to upgrade to e-commerce facilities in the future. thanks for the idea but!

chachi, Tia stands for thanks in advanced :$ i shouldn't have abbreviated it hehe
My name is John

Yeah I am currently trying to develop an online community at the moment by just using friends and friends of friends to join. This is proving very difficult, so I've learnt from my studies of e-commerce that starting up a community and website is much more effective when there is a common topic or interest for ethusiasts to write about.

But how do you get them to participate? Its kind of hard sometimes. Perhaps a incentive scheme like the 'ad revenue sharing' here at digitial point, or the 'free hosting point redeeming' schemes at inuration.net forums.

 

If you are looking for a content management system why dont you consider using Mambo OS it is a great a great cms and easy to admin also great addons like intergtrated forums. Go to www.mamboserver.com or www.mamboportal.com to find out more. From my experiences i have found mambo by far the best cms out there and a bonus is that it is free.

Well good luck with it all and with your schooling

 

You can consider using postnuke as well. It's a php based CMS that I'm currently using. 1 problem I feel with starting a forum immediately is the initial lack of users. Without sufficient users to generate any form of meaningful discussion, the forum will appear empty and might even put off new users.

 

build content and traffic first, setup forums later. You need a few thousand unique visitors a day to kee a forum a alive.

 

lol, sorry about that John. I guess I was a little tired when I posted that last night.

If you are going to start with some forums, you may want to start by entering into a reciprocal posting group to help get things moving. I know there are some people here who can help you with that. I am sure getting natural search traffic for terms that people interested in the subject will help you attract new users. Those are two of the most cost effective techniques I can think of.

 

mddv, my friend was talking about installing mambo on his current website. so i was curious to see how that turned out.

mudnik, ive used postnuke before, but at the time I was less experienced. I think I will be looking for a CMS that will be able to integrate Invision Power Board forums. I really dont like the administration control of phpBB.


dejaone, I will consider your advice and not integrate the forums until I have enough unique visitors. Because as mudnik said, an empty forum may put off new users and that is the last thing i want...

cahchi, Whats a reciprocal posting group?...

I think I will also subscribe to Adsense in the future too..

 

Hi sapphiro15,
I didn't know anything about postnuke too but decided to use it to build up my website. Bascially just learnt it along the way. Not really sure about power board forums thingie as I have not setup any forums.

If I'm not wrong, a reciprocal posting group is a group of forum owners who co-operate together and post in each other's forum. It's a way to kick off your own forum at the initial stage.

Don't put off the adsense part. Every day delayed is money lost.

 

For a CMS, also take a look at SlashCode and Typo3. Both are bears to start out with, but offer a lot in the way of functionality. PhpNuke and PostNuke I wouldn't recommend. Thought they were great at first, but in the end they were both problematic.

As far as advice:

Start out with at least thirty pages before you go live.
Register your URL at the last minute if it's something you think is safe, because the spiders may find you from recently registered domain lists that get posted.
Buy Google Hacks. It has a lot of great info.
Add pages regularly, hopefully daily.
Content matters most.
If you can secure some inbound links from your college buddies at their .edu websites, do it.
Don't bombard people with ad's from the get-go. Build your community first.
If you offer something useful - a tool, utility, good advice that's not already out there, then you can inspire more visitors.
Post to your own forums regularly. Don't let people have questions that go unanswered. It's hard to build a forum if your site does not have that much traffic.
Use open source software where possible, and post your site to their list of "sites using this software", I get probably five hits a day from phorum.org and every little bit helps, + the inbound link helps.
Have a plan for link development. Why would somebody link to you? How will you approach them? Who is your target audience.
Do not target more than two sets of keywords per page.
Have an easy to see theme on your site. Don't go all over the place.
Instead of hosting, look into dedicated servers and colocation. It might not be where you start out, but if you are successful, that's where you will end up.
read about your registrar before registering. Some registrars like to play games. For instance, I didn't renew a domain for a side business that wasn't getting attention and stargate held the domain for 30 days before I could renew. (or I could pay $150.00) NetSol did the same thing only worse. They send you a warning, then yank your site before the deadline, then you can't transfer it.
Find something not only you like, but your buddies do as well. If you can get them to post in your forums, keep up to date on your site, etc. for free then things will go better. I can't stress enough that people will not post to a forum that has only 5 or 6 postings.
Watch your stats closely. Lots of good info there.
Make sure your site renders well in all browsers.
Make sure your site is compliant with standards.

 

I don't like *Nuke* CMS's myself.

Try using GeekLog (don't let the name put you off, it did for me and I started using PostNuke - bad move), or like someone else said Mambo is also quite good.

 

Thank you for your replies! I have been absorbing your teachings but I have a lot of silly questions to ask u :x

Sorry I dont understand what you meant :x Could you please explain it...

Whats google hacks

Howcome?...

So you wouldnt recommend starting out with hosting and moving to a dedicated server one day? Where can I find these "colocations" :s

In other words, find out if they are trustworthy?

Sorry about the n00b questions and Thank you for your replies.
I found Typo3 and Mambo really appealling CMS's and I will most probably choose one of them for the website!

 

OK... let me also fill you in on the fact that these are all my opinions. Anyone else can come in and refute them. I'm not a professional SEO.

Register your URL at the last minute ... Maybe I should have said Register your domain at the last minute.

I guess what I'm saying here is that you want to have all your prep work done before you go live with the site.

google hacks: a book by the OReilly company. They make a lot of great books and that's one of them.

no more than two sets of keywords:
because you won't be successful with more than that. You want to have your targeted keywords in the title, the url, header text, and mentioned a few times on the page. Targeting more makes your pages unreadable, and it won't rank as high as a cleaner page, with all other things being equal.


So you wouldnt recommend starting out with hosting and moving to a dedicated server one day?

For costs from the get go, you'll probably start out with hosting, but I don't know what your budget is. A lot of hosting providers will stick 60-600 hosts on the same webserver. All it takes is one to screw things up for everyone - either through high traffic, or a poorly written cgi or php script. Once you get past the cost of the server, colocation isn't that much more expensive than hosting. I personally had terrible experience with hosting, and have great experience with colocation. Plus now, I host all the family web sites, and I have over a thousand family pictures online and it doesn't cost me a thing. I run my own spam filters, do my own custom apache builds, etc. I started out with one server that ran my dns, mail, and web services. I had uptime of about a year with no problems. Eventually I picked up another one for reliability since I need to have backups of most everything now. I don't know if this is allowed (mentioning another forum), but webhostingtalk.com has a message board specifically for colocation and dedicated servers. They also have a lot of offers from hosting companies there that seem like decent deals. That's where I found both of my colo providers. You want a dedicated server though instead of colocation if you don't know how to secure and administer a server.


In other words, find out if they are trustworthy? Yep. Searching in Google Groups usually will bring up any complaints.

 

Ok, I'm going to give you a small idea to get your users into the forums

Find as many forums now to do with the subject that you are fanatical about and join them. Get to know as many people as you can and when you launch your forum tell everyone you know on those forums about your forum. Basically you're stealing the forums members but it is a very cost effective way of making it work You could perhaps offer something that is different from other sites which will make it worth their while. eg DP's good point is the free tools etc

 

Stealing members is funny lol.
But i'll have to steal members that are local, because thats the main aim of the site. Thanks for the ideas though hehe

 

Was that another hint at your ecommerce plan? lol

It is true though. If you tell people from forums that are already in existance then they will be the people that are familiar with forums and will be the most interested. Getting people to join a forum for the first time is harder and they are more likely to not come back.

 

>So you wouldnt recommend starting out with hosting and
>moving to a dedicated server one day?
I think they meant make sure the host you choose has a good dedicated option so you can easily upgrade when you need to / can afford to.

>Targeting more makes your pages unreadable, and it won't rank as high
>as a cleaner page, with all other things being equal.
Absolutely, unless they are related keyword phrases.

 

Here is my advice: do not over optimize! Build a site that you like, are excited about and believe in, and create unique content, an easy to navigate layout and keep everything fresh.

Noone knows how the search engine algorithms will change, but I believe that will stand the test of times.

Customer service is 80% of it all.

Read this about search engine friendly web design

Mike

 

I advice that you dont use postnuke (or any CMS that has nuke in it). It is the most unsecure CMS I have ever seen and is easily hackable. Read aroung forums and you will know the reason.

Best of Luck,