Filipe - 11:03 pm on May 13, 2002 (gmt 0)

Step one: Move to full time. The kind of web management you are describing is not a part-time job and never can be.

The development process has been time consuming, stressful, and inefficient.

Great post Black_Knight - definitely a correlation there.

Another thing that you'll definitely need is knowledge, and lots of it. If you haven't had much formal training or professional experience, doing this part-time will not work. I started making websites purely based on my own experience in making websites. I started a BIG project, which took me 2 years to do (heh, not to say I didn't do it successfully). I was learning scripting as I went along. Later we found that a lot of stuff I did left a lot wanting as far as security and server-bottlenecks, so it had to be redone by a more experienced team (not much to the fault of the company since my layout had already set up a significant user-base... but as the site grew bigger, other things became a concern).

In order to carry out a planned project efficiently you'll have to keep the following things in mind:

1. Scalability
2. Expandability
3. Ease of editing

To implement these successfully takes a very good working knowledge of database, bottlenecks, server platforms, scripting languages, and administration technology.

A lot of these are things you won't develop part-time - and you'll be much better off if you stick to the slow, inefficient web development model. There are tons of ways you can streamline that without having to jump into a different tier of business or a whole new business model. My recommendation is working at an established company for a few years, hoard as much knowledge as you can from everybody, and then branch off later.