A Friends Web Site...

Back in 2003 a friend of mine enrolled on a three month web site building course. This was about the same time that I was becoming interested in building my own website.

After about the third week he showed me the web site that he had started and I was quite impressed by it. I followed his progress with interest and by the end of his course he had a web site with about 10 pages.

Although it looked a good web site his biggest frustration was that no one visited his site. To me, all the effort that had gone in to creating the web site seemed a bit pointless if no one knew that it existed.

Research...

I was now really keen to create my own website, but only if I knew that people would visit it, so I started researching what I would need to do. Now at the time I had no experience so I knew that I'd have a lot to learn. That's when it became a bit daunting as my research brought up things like:

• HTML
• SEO
• Keywords
• Hyperlinks
• Newsletters
• Etc

The Breakthrough...

One day I came across a website that promised to be able to help me build my own website in 10 easy lessons, without the need for any expert knowledge. Not only that but it just about guaranteed that I'd be able to make generate a second income from the web site.

It seemed too good to be true so I continued doing more research for another 2 months or so, but kept coming back to that web site.

I finally made the decision, took the plunge and bought the web site building package. It wasn't much of a gamble really as they have a money back guarantee.

Apart from all the tools needed to build a web site you get a 10 day course, in text and video form that takes you from an initial web site to a fully functioning monetized web site.

What I found was that it took a sort of paint by numbers approach, if you followed the system and put in some effort, you couldn't fail.

Building The Web Site...

By the end of day 3 I had 1000 keywords from which to build my website. Now that's motivation enough to move forward.

On day 5 I'd registered my domain name.

On day 6 I started building my web pages. How easy that was, and still is. You basically choose a block and put some text in it, exactly as you would if creating a Word document. No need to learn any HTML code. There's a building block for everything that you need; keywords, title, headlines, text, graphics, links, etc.

There are design facilities to help you create your page logo, navigation options, newsletter, blog, etc. The list is endless and it's all included in the package.

The Barbecuehut Now...

At the time of writing this I now get over 1000 visitors pay day to me web site in Summer, which I don't think is bad at all. I'm continually adding pages and love doing it. The extra income that the web site generates from advertisements and affiliate programs is very nice as well!

By the way, the web site building package that I use is Site Build It! If you've the 'I want to build my own website feeling', it's well worth taking a look.