Forum Moderators: mack
My brother knows how to make webpages and I had an idea for a site that I figured would get alot of hits. (A help site for a game that have played since we were kids that is still very popular).
My question is, how much would we have to invest into it? I know this kind of thing doesnt really happen overnight but how much money is in these kind of sites that get commisions from advertisements?
Your content, Time, Search engine.
Adword?, dont you think it will make your
site too comercial when it is just started?
and adword costs,if you have product to sell, adword might be a good solution.
[edited by: mack at 4:22 am (utc) on Nov. 5, 2005]
[edit reason] No need for all caps ;-) [/edit]
You can very easily set up Apache on your home computer to run an offline test version of the site too.
A help site for a game that have played since we were kids that is still very popular
Junanagoh,
Make sure you pick the right topic. People will visit a site like the one you outlined above for free information - not to buy anything. If you want to make money, you may have to either widen the scope or reconsider the topic.
arran.
My original plan was to add adwords or something similar to make money, but I got attached to the website, and the finished version probably won't contain any ads or anything, as I have become too attached and don't want to 'degrade it'.
The website is on the back burner at the moment though, as my ecommerce site must take full priority.
Welcome to webmasterworld btw, its thanks to these guys that my website is even partially successful.
The only money I will make from my site will be from ads. I have a great eCommerce idea that I would like to work on but I would need the money to invest into it which I dont have right now. So I will put all of my time into my "Free Information" site that I will put a twist onto the limit the competition. Thank you all for all of the great information.
I will continue to snoop around the forums and hope that any other people like me learn from this post.
I've been spending tons of time designing the functionality of my pages and my PHP/MySQL "backend" in the hopes that this will save me time in the future. I think that I'm right, but who knows?
I am also outsourcing all the content, i.e. I am getting other people to write the actual articles and them I am going to edit them. I´m now paying 200$ for 50 articles, total of 25000 words. If you are planning 100-150 articles this might be an idea? To jumpstart your website and not wait 6 monts.
After you start receiving good traffic, the advice of Brett in article mentioned in earlyer post, is to study referal logs carefully. If someone finds your site on google, using the term "warhammer necromancer magic" and clicks on link to your site in google results, you will be able to see from visitors logs, if you have proper software" what search words that visitor used to find your site. You can take that as suggestions for what content to write next.
Or you can use a website that specailices in finding out what words people use when searching online, and see what words are connected to your particular game.
Don´t forget art. Good thumbnail sized art can do wonders for articles.
And about paying somone to script it for me, I am having alot of fun messing around with html right now and have people to help me when I get stuck. I do like your idea about making a picture of it on photoshop though since I will have a better idea of what I want it too look like before I start making it (instead of fooling around with html) :)
My mantra is: "Keep the overhead low." I can't imagine how you do that with outsourcing. Besides, the fun in this for me is learning how to put it all together. Hopefully the fun will eventually involve generating revenue. :)
My preference is Fireworks, since it will export your layout into html, although there's lots of tweaking after you export in order to get the file size down.
Re: My previous post on PHP/MySQL, you may wish to read this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]
And since you know that I am TOTLALLY new at this, what do you mean by overhead? And how do i keep the file size down?
By overhead I just mean cost--money out of pocket.
I have read wisdom here that says to keep your total file size below 15K. I don't see how this is possible if you want to use pictures and graphics. To answer your question about how to keep file size down, see Webmonkey re: optimizing images. I think the conventional wisdom is to use gif files whenever possible. When you need better quality, use jpeg and optimize it for the web, which is usually about 70 to 80% quality in the graphics programs.
Geez. I'm talking like someone who knows what he's doing. Scary.
Most of my site will be a combination of information from alot of my competition. No, I will not plegerize but some of the information that I need is hard to just pull out of my memory. (I.E. quests in the game that I did 3 years ago. I will read it from a couple sites and then put it in my own words.)
The main portion of my site though will be done differently then all of my competition. That is what I figure will get alot of people to see my site. I have talked to a few people about my idea and they all approve. Once my site gets started I will also try to find some qualified individuals to write some articles for the site that explain that topic in more detail.
The only reason I am going to put things like 'quests' on the site it to make it more universal as well and hopefully I will get people coming back and back again to use my site as a reference.
P.S. Sorry for all of the spelling errors. I am a horrible speller.
Err, I think that's keep the "HTML" file size below 15K, not the "page" size.
The "page" is made from the HTML, the CSS and the images combined.
I'm sure you have seen multiple posts where people had confused <title> tags and title attributes, or called the alt attribute something else, or mixed up the <head>er of the HTML file, with <h>eading tags... and then got all confused.
Most of my site will be a combination of information from alot of my competition.
<snip>
The main portion of my site though will be done differently then all of my competition. That is what I figure will get alot of people to see my site.
...and that may be the only frontier left on the net for us folks who are not market leaders or visionaries: Doing it better than the competition. Nothing wrong with that. That's exactly what I'm doing...er...trying to do.
Unfortunately, I have a day job (career) and it will, in fact, have to wait.
I hope to get this going in a few months. About the static and dynamic sites, is there a good program to make a static site?
(By this I am assuming static=a program generating the html and dynamic=writing it yourself so you can do more with it. Is that correct?)
(By this I am assuming static=a program generating the html and dynamic=writing it yourself so you can do more with it. Is that correct?)
Mmmmmm...no. Static = straight html. Dynamic = PHP, ASP or the like. E.g., you have a website about widgets and you want to feature 100 of them. A static website would have 100 html pages set up: widget_1.htm, widget_2.htm ... widget_100.htm.
A dynamic site would have one page of code and 100 rows in a database. That one page of code would receive a variable for each different widget, query the database, and then construct the html on the fly and present it to your browser.
As a further example, the page you are reading right now is a dynamic page. It as to be. If you look in your address bar, you will see stuff at the end of the url like "...cgi?action=something... etc. I don't know anything about cgi, but I think that "action" would be the name of the variable and "something" would be its value.
As for software, I use Macromedia Dreamweaver to code my html and php pages, although I rarely use the WYSIWYG editor. I almost always use code view.
So I have to learn more then just html then?
For example, I'm going to have at least one new article a day, maybe more. All I have to do is dump my writing into my database (with a few html tags like <p> here and there) and the php pages I have programmed take care of the rest. They put the headlines in the right place, place the newer articles at the top of the page, push the older articles down the page and sort the really old articles into an archive that is organized by date.
Very, very handy. And, I might add, not too hard to learn once you have html down.
