A fancy theme vs quality content

I've noticed over the years that a lot of webmasters can
become obsessed with themes, CSS, and the overall
appearance of their web sites. Sometimes they become
so obsessed with their site's aesthetics and neglect it's
most important aspect, the content.

I won't say that a really cool theme doesn't help a site.
However, no matter how cool the theme is a theme adds
nothing that your visitors are really interested in. Look at
the search hits you get everyday. Ever seen one that
says, "websites about Alice in Wonder with a really cool
theme"?

No, of course not.

People look for things they are interested in. I won't say that
you shouldn't spend time trying to make you site look good
for your users. However, I will point out that if your site is
about making jewelry, focus on posting content about
making jewelry. If your site is legible and easy to navigate
no one will notice or care that you are using a default theme.

Webmaster tools from the major search engines

A new webmaster may not be aware that the major
search engines offer some extra tools that they might
find useful. As a general rule you only need to have
registered an account with them previously. In all cases
listed here a simple email account with them will allow
you access to the tools.

Google offers their Webmasters tools which are quite
comprehensive although I have observed that the
results they give you in regard to your site will wildly
fluctuate.*

*Please note: This is only my experience, it may be
different with your site(s).

Yahoo! offers their Site Explorer. It doesn’t seem to
offer quite as many controls and options as Google’s
but their results seem to be a bit more stable and
they do let you see when your pages were last
indexed by their searchbots, very handy if you have
been updating pages and want to know if the updates
have been indexed.

MSN offer their Webmaster Tools as well. It would seem
to still be in it’s Beta form so I can’t really tell what
features it will have when it is finished and operational.
However, I will say what I saw was impressive and should
be fairly useful.

In all cases you will need to validate your site by either
included a meta tag or by uploading a file to you site’s
root directory. Personally, I find uploading the file to
be the simplest and quickest option.*

*Note: Google and Yahoo! will provide you with a
pre-generated XML file that you can upload. MSN
however provides you with a file name and an HTML
code to make the file yourself. It is fairly simple and
painless. Open a notepad and copy the code to it
and save the file using the file name they provide.
Under Windows you will need to select Save As
and select All Files in order to save the file as an
XML.

Forum hosting: Free vs Paid

So you want to open a forum but have only limited
experience with such things.

Well you have two basic choices, an ad supported free
forum such as ProBoards, Invisionfree, or SMFforFree.
Or you can use you own hosting account and install the
forum script of you choice such as vBulliten, SMF, or PHPBB.

Some pros and cons of both...

Ad supported free forums:

Pros:
1) It's free! (duh!)

2)They're pretty much fire and forget. By this I mean, once you
set up the account all you have to do is decide how many categories
and forums you want and decide on a theme for it. No need to
worry about backing up the database or any other major maintenance.

Cons:
1) If the company hosting it goes out of business you're sunk.

2) You get to look at ugly ads that are placed as in-your-face
as you can get.
(Firefox with Adblock Plus usually fixes this but not everyone uses FF)

3) You have to work within the host's TOS and a lot of times they
can be awfully picky about the content you can post.

4) Some people tend to (wrongly) look down their noses
at free hosted forums

Hosting it yourself:

Pros:
1) You have full control over the forum and you're the boss.

1a) If your host offers Fantastico or other similar one click script
installers, installing the forum can take only a matter of minutes.

2) It is under your domain name, so if you have a store on
the same site it can give your customers a place to ask questions
or leave you feed back to tell you what works and what doesn't

3) You have greater control over the look and feel of the forum.

Cons:
1) You gotta pay the bills for the upkeep.

2) You're stuck with making sure you have back ups and doing
the needed maintenance. (ICK!)

3) You get to look at ugly ads you put there yourself.
(j/k Well, sorta...)

Advice for the aspiring Webmaster

So you've been on the internet for a while now.
You've surfed, searched, maybe even posted on
forums and just maybe even made a couple of
bucks selling stuff on eBay or even Amazon.

Now you have come to the point where you
have a twinkle in your eye and the desire to
make your own site and claim your own little
chunk of bandwidth and disk space on the 'net
but you realize one tiny little problem, you don't
have a clue where to start!

I've been on the net since the late 90's and I've
done and seen quite a bit in that time. I'm not
going to claim I have all the answers, I don't.
But I can offer you a few pieces of hard earned
advice...

1) There ain't no such thing as a stupid question.
All of us start out the exact same way, utterly
ignorant of what a WYSIWYG editor is, or what
an FTP client is, let alone what they're for.

Ask questions no matter how silly you think they are.
Anyone that laughs or mocks you doesn't merit your
attention.

2) Expect to spend long hours pouring over pages and
pages of Geek Speek.
A lot programmers and coders write manuals for other
geeks not us poor dumb bunnies that just want to build
a site and maybe even a small online home business. And
for this, I refer you to point 1.

When in doubt, ask.

3) Don't stress over not getting a lot of traffic for the
first year or so.
Most of your traffic will likely be friends and family or
If you've sold stuff online and had repeat customers
they might take a look at your new store to see if you have
anything they might want. Other than that the search
engine's bots will take their dear sweet time crawling
your site and the engines will take their dear sweet time
in getting off their butt's and putting you into their search
results.

4) Being a Webmaster is an art, not an exact science.
In four years, I've gone from a thumb fingered forum
poster, and small time eBay seller, that had only a nodding
acquaintance with punctuation to an "accomplished"
Webmaster. Have I mastered it yet? (ROFLMACO) Nope.
Every time I log in I learn something new...

and I still ask "stupid" questions.