Organization

A list of some of the tasks you need to do to organize your resources.

Download webmaster spreadsheet
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Spreadsheet - Planning Sheet

On this sheet you will write down your mission, strategy, target market, competition, competitive advantage, profit strategy, content strategy (including static, dynamic, and interactive content), your marketing strategy, design, and slogan. This stuff might seem like stuff you don't need to write down but it helps clarify your plan and forces you to come up with answers for important questions. It may even save you the trouble of spending time on a site that you shouldn't have done at all.

Spreadsheet - Usernames and Passwords

With your page you may have up to 50 different affiliate programs which gives 100 usernames and passwords plus addition logins for web sites and all the usernames and passwords for your hosting (operations, FTP, MySQL, mail, etc).

Spreadsheet - Domains

If you have fun creating and growing a web site and become successful then you'll probably have other ideas for other sites you'll want to set up. You will definitely start planning your future sites while you are working on your current sites. If you think of some good names for future sites you will want to write them down. You will also want to keep track of your current domains.

Spreadsheet - Revenue

You will want to records the revenue you earn from different advertisers - especially if you have a lot of them.

Spreadsheet - Expenses

You will want to record all your expenses as you incur them becuase it makes it easier to do your taxes. At the end of the year you don't want to have to go back and look up expenses - it is a pain in the ass.

Spreadsheet - Content Creation Tracker

On this page you will make a list of all the pages your site will have and monitor your progress. The "section" column will have the different sections on your site. The "page" column list each page you are creating. The "goal" column will have 100% as the default value because you will want 100% of the page done at the end. The "Progress" column will be empty and you will fill out the percent of each page that is done as you create more content. This column has been conditionally formatted so that the cell appears white if it is empty, yellow if the page is partially done, and green if the page is completed.

Spreadsheet - To-do list

The new ideas you come up with over time will be one of your biggest factors of success. This sheet in the spreadsheet will organize those ideas for one site so you can prioritize them and won't forget any of them. As a beginning webmaster you may think there could never be more than 5 or 10 things you need to do but ambitious wemsters always have countless ideas on new additions and improvements to their site. I use this exact sheet for my new idas and right now I have about 300 things on my list for just one of my sites. Here is an explanation of each column.

COLUMN A: - Write in a description of the task that needs to be done.
COLUMN B: - How urgent is the task? "1" means it should be done as soon as possible. "2" means it can wait a little while but should be done. "3" means it is the least important and wouldn't even matter if it gets done. You can sort by this column when you want to see how many urgent tasks you have and what they are.
COLUMN C: - Are you able to do it? "1" means the task is something you know how to do well. "2" means you don't know how to solve the problem. it could be a coding problem or something.
COLUMN D: - What type of task is it? I separated them into different categories, which I explain in the following table. Sorting by this column is good when you want to work on a particular functional aspect of the site - for example, if you want to work on just marketing or take a day and work on all the problems with your forum.
- Operations - This has to do with tracking profits, dealing with affiliate programs, monitoring traffic, doing Google searches for different items, talking to other webmasters, legal issues, buying software or hardware you need, organzing your information and files, and plenty of other stuff.
- Content - improve. This basically means updating, changing, or adding content on subjects you already have on your pages. This is to increase the quality of your traffic - making sure your visitors are getting the most use of your site.
- Content - add. This means adding new topics to your web site. This is to increase the quantity of traffic you are getting. You will have your current visitors viewing more pages as well as having more visitors come to your site as a result of more SEO traffic.
- Backend/Scripts - These are projects which involve adding a function to your page.
- Forum - This has it's own section because dealing with a forum can be a whole job in itself. You have to update the forum when newer version come out, add functionality to your forum, monitor your forum traffic to see what topics are most popular, deal with forum users, etc.
- Design & Layout - This designation is for changes in the presentation of your site. You may realize that you need to change the navigation, the color scheme, etc.
COLUMNS E & F: - Is the task a short-term or long-term task? Sorting by short-term can give you a list of items that you can do quickly if you feel like crossing a bunch of stuff off your list.
COLUMNS G: - Is it an ongoing task? Sorting by this column shows you what "overhead" you have for your page in terms of different jobs that constantly need to be done. This can help you make decision about outsourcing work.
COLUMNS H: - Is this task one that you aren't sure about? Having this column is good because if you sort by a different column then you can do a secondary sort by this column and filter out projects you aren't even sure about.
COLUMNS I: - Is this a task which you are going to have to pay someone to do? Sorting by this can help you make a list of projects you will need to outsource and allows you to estimate how much money you will have to spend on the projects.
COLUMNS J: - Comments. This is just for random notes on different projects.

Web Browser Favorites

As a webmaster you will constantly be looking around the web at different sites for help with different problems and you'll want to bookmark the good sites so you can use them later. This may seem like common sense, but I know tons of computer users who end up bookmarking hundreds of sites and not organizing them and they literally have a scrollable list of hundreds of bookmarks which are not helpful because they could never find anything if they needed to.

I recommend you keep a "Web Publishing" folder on your main Favorites list with at least 15 folders of main categories (coding, design, marketing, etc) and 5-10 subfolders in each folder. If you are a dedicated webmaster you may end up bookmarking a thousand sites and you will want to organize them very well. I have about 850 bookmarks relating to web publishing. Even if you are very organized you may need to spend one day a year organizing your favorites.