Changing Your Site

Changing Your Site

My Trial & Error

I was a “hack-and-go” sort of person off the start. I have re-made thousands of web pages, most of them by inefficient means. Some of my worst mistakes are: using frames, trying to become an affiliate of over 1,000 websites, free money scams, and generally creating garbage without learning about the web.

Business & Change

The Internet is a highly responsive, trackable medium. You should WANT to change to evaluate consumer response. Successful businesses evolve. Successful entrepreneurs keep learning. Few sites stay on top forever by being stagnant. It’s hard to think of change before you even start building your site, but right now I have thousands of pages that are reminding me of changes I still need to make.

Creating a Site Design

Seth Godin offered me some great advice for site design. He said, “The best way to make a web page is to steal an outlay idea from another website that is not directly competing with you.” When you go to make your first web page, do so as a sketch. After you have a good idea (which is at least slightly different than the site you got your idea from), recreate your home page as a picture in an editor such as Adobe Photoshop. From there you can pay a design firm to create your page, or create it yourself using a program such as Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Software such as Site Grinder and some companies like PSD2HTML and XHTMLized convert Photoshop images to websites for affordable rates.

If you do not mind using an existing template, OSWD.org is a website that has a bunch of free web designs you can chose from. Many content management systems, such as blogs, also have free template galleries. You can start with one of the designs and modify it to make it look unique.