Welcome to WebpageBlueprint
A litle description of this site.
Who this site is for
This site is basically aimed at 2 different groups: beginning webmasters looking to build their first site and intermediate webmasters who are looking to build more successful web sites and build a website portfolio. This site is not geared toward someone who is just looking to put up a quick page on Geocities that will grow more stale every day. It is for people who are looking to improve their ability to come up with ideas for web sites and how to code, design, market, and run them. The reason why I set this page up is because there is an enormous amount of information on the web for webmasters but I believe alot of it is very narrow, misguided, and fragmented.The need for direction
The narrow information on the web tends to weigh very heavily on how to code and not enough on the business end. By "business" I don't necessarily mean making money - I am talking about looking at the strategy, the marketplace demand and supply, and other variables that will influence your success. I have seen many great coders put up great looking sites that look way better than sites that I put up but my sites get much more traffic and make much more money because I understand the key success factors and environment better than they do. Even if your web site is not a business you have to look at it as if it were one if you want it to be successful. You have to analyze it through the microscope of economics. Economics is the study of "maximizing resource allocation". This basically means getting the most output while managing your limited inputs. As a webmaster your main inputs will be time, money, and skills. You will have to figure out how to get the most out of these.The misguided information is because, even though there is tons of help online about how to become a successful webmaster, much of the advice is too egocentric. Much of the talk online is about how webmasters can help themselves when they should be asking themselves how can they help the end user.
The fragmented information makes it hard for a beginner to come up with a comprehensive and complete plan on how to come up with a good idea and how to implement it. Since creating a web business is such a big project there is no "complete source" to go to. The most common way webmasters learn is through trial and error. The result is that beginning webmasters creating their first page, and intermediate webmasters creating their first "hard" page, underestimate how long it will take them to get from beginning to end.
There are so many webmasters who have web sites they plan to put up, but months after the site was supposed to be up there is a "Coming Soon" page saying how it is taking longer than usual. This is because creating a web presence is alot more than typing out what you want to say, sticking it in an HTML file, and uploading it. If you are planning on putting up an intermediate page then it can be a big project. The reason for most web publishing delays is that most people underestimate some parts of the building process. Many webmasters concentrate on the time it will take to write content while thinking that all the other responsibilities are small, quick, administrative things that won't take a lot of time. But there are some big issues most webmasters underestimate in the building process, including: sculpting the brand identity of the site, getting the backend completely operational, getting the right layout and aesthetic appeal of the site.
The purpose of this site
The goal of this site is to try to get webmasters to realize the scope of tasks that need to be accomplished to get from beginning to end, and try to help them create a plan for themselves and share knowledge and resources to make it easier. The intermediate webmasters are usually the ones who have the "Coming Soon" signs on their sites because most of them are the ones who have set up a quick web site in the past (a site with only a few static HTML pages) and are now on to building a more advanced, larger site and underestimate how much time they need to deal with speedbumps that come along. The completely inexperienced people looking to set up a site at least know they know nothing. Unfortunately, many of these beginning webmasters find the web site building process so complicated that they buy a just domain name and literally don't even get any further than the "What do I do next?" phase.The internet is getting more and more competitive every day but there are still huge pockets of opportunity. Take online advertising: after the hype of banners ads went away after the dot com bubble crashed and targeted links (Adsense, etc) rose to take their place, people thought the dynamics of online advertising had finally been set in stone. But then milliondollarhomepage.com comes along with a fresh idea that literally hundreds of millions of people looked over and he did it by using banners - those old discarded advertising relics from the last century.
The point of this site is not to intimidate you. It is to clarify the processes of becoming a successful webmaster and demystify some of the reasons some web sites do very well, while others don't. It is also to make you realize that there is opportunity on the Internet unlike any other time over the past few decades - the online world has opened up a whole new category of opportunities where people can not only make money and be successful but do so with less cost and less risk. The internet has democratized business to a large degree. Assuming you aren't starting up a large e-commerce site which would require a huge bankroll, you don't need much money to start up a web site and be successful. Although there are many web-building sites that will tell you what the tools are, this site will tell you how to actually use the tools to be successful. Anyone can go to Home Depot and buy a hammer but that doesn't mean they know to build.
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