I’ve received a lot of feedback on my earlier posting, Don’t Build a Web Site, Build a Web Style, most of it positive, so I decided to do a few follow up pieces that will walk step-by-step through the process that I use when building a new site.
The first thing you have to do is decide what your site is going to generally be about? Whether your site is going to be a monument to your hobby or a commercial venture to generate sales of some kind, my best advice is to stay with topics you have some experience and passion about. Sure, there’s a lot of money to be made building financial information sites full of affiliate links, but if you don’t care about personal finances that will reflect in the end results and your site will end up lost in cyberspace.
For this example, lets assume you enjoy Home and Gardening projects, and that you want to build an affiliate site around them that’s enjoyable for you and will generate some income as well through the affiliate links.
Since this is about building your web style I’m going to skip the step of choosing affiliate programs to promote here. There are tons of them out there, and they cover every topic imaginable–so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding several to match your topic.
The next step is crucial, now that you know the general theme of your site and have your affiliate links ready to publish, you need to narrow down your specific niche.
The reason for this is simple, a general web site about all Home and Gardening topics may seem like a great idea, but in reality it encompasses far too much for the average person to be able to build and maintain a comprehensive site on.
So, we’ll pick a specific aspect of Home and Gardening to trim it down for ourselves. I enjoy landscaping in my yard, so for this example I’m going to make my site about that.
Okay, now that we have our niche, landscaping, we need to create a few (4 to 7 is usually good and manageable) sub-categories within it to map out our site.
Off the top of my head I can think of several good ones I’d want to include:
1) Green Grass (covering lawn care and maintenance)
2) The Tool Shed (covering tools and equipment that are used in the lawn and garden)
3) Water World (covering pools and ponds)
4) Stonehenge (covering rock gardens, stone walls and patios/walkways)
5) The Green Thumb (covering all things planted, from flowers to vegetables and even bushes and trees)
6) Wildlife (covering wild animals, attracting some and preventing others)
Notice that I’ve used fun category headings that are easily recognizable and memorable for human readers. Many so-called experts say that you should stick with cold, descriptive names and titles that are stuffed with polished keywords that search engine bots will go giddy over.
I’m not going to argue with those experts, I just ignore them. I build sites that are intended for human consumption, and I won’t cater to bots and spiders at the expense of the human visitor. If you create pages with original content, the search engines will index them. If your site and content are pleasurable and informative to your human visitors, they;ll keep coming back. They’ll start linking to your pages in their sites and blogs, and your site will do well.
Now we’ve really got something started. We know our site is generally about landscaping, and we’ve mapped out 6 specific, related categories to guide our content creation.
That’s half the battle in developing a Web Style. The other half comes in the content that you’ll actually create. And speaking of web style, you’ll notice that while I’ve used the term “web site” all through this piece, I’ve never once mentioned any kind of coding or programming. As I’ve said before, there are great scripts and programs already available which handle the technical stuff for us, we’re not really building a web site, we’re creating our web style.
The next step will be to create several (or tons) of content pieces (articles/pages/whatever you want to call them) for each category, and be sure to include your affiliate links within the text content. Banners and other common advertisements get overlooked or ignored by many web surfers, but links (especially within your content) get clicked.
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