dcheney - 3:20 am on Jan 2, 2006 (gmt 0)

I think most of us with hobby/information type sites started out gradually. One of my main projects started out on a free hosting service using hand-made pages.

From there it grew and I started generating the pages using a database.

Later I started using a paid hosting service.

Since logs became available at this point, I started using basic log analysis tools.

Also this was when it became possible to supported user feedback through a form (rather than just putting an email address on the site).

Next step was to get my own domain name.

Then I added a "group" (email list) to announce changes.

Later that was supplemented with a blog (and RSS feed) to provide more information about changes.

No doubt I'll continue to add additional things that I don't expect. But for most newbies, just start working on the content. You don't have to learn how to do everything on day 1.

Obviously for an e-commerce site things would be different.