First Attempt at a Site

Maze · #1 (**permalink**) July 30th, 2003

I'll soon be attempting my first site and know NOTHING at all about it. Any help for a beginner would be helpfull. You can email me any time with tips, advice, ideas, help and offer to help. Hey, I'm just a Cop and a Rod Builder, what do I know ?! lol Thanks guys, this site is Primo!
Maze

Gr8flyz · #2 (**permalink**) July 30th, 2003

Maze, the best advise I can give you is to keep it simple. High tech type pages, and those with large pics & animated graphics often load slow, especially on older machines & dial-up connections. Many people won't waste time waiting for web pages to load, so they won't see that nice site you set up if it don't load up in a reasonable amount of time.

Also, depending on what you have in mind, try to stay away from free hosting sites that have a bunch of pop-up ads. Pop-ups detract from your site & since your intended audience will be anglers, the pop-ups will just annoy them, and again they won't hang around long!

Last thing I can think of is to keep it as simple as possible to navigate around your site. Depending again on what you intend with your site & how much you're going to put on it, if you don't make it as simple & easy as possible for folks to find things they'll go to other sites to look for things they want.

You said you're a cop, think of it as directing traffic, you have to tell them where you want them to go, & get them there fast.

I hope this helps, and I'm sure some of the other's here can add to what I've said.

Good luck with it, & any other advise I can give, just ask.

deadlystreamer · #3 (**permalink**) August 18th, 2003

Ray,
Go to www.bigfishtackle.com and find the "build a free site" It's real easy and if you need help with it, let me know. See my site below. The myweb.ecomplanet one. It was built there. Good luck.

Big Splash · #4 (**permalink**) August 19th, 2003

I just spent the afternoon building a web site on the Bigfishtackle site. It's my first try at anything like this, and I'm still working on it, but if you would like to check it out here is the address.
http://myweb.ecomplanet.com/BISL5958
Any comments or help would be appreciated, Thanks.

deadlystreamer · #5 (**permalink**) August 19th, 2003

You've done a super job on that site. Professional looking and very nice. Now check out the bottom of my quali-tied site and you'll see a banner for the site add that I use once a month.(www.siteadd.com) I keep a posted chart to make sure I submit both sites on the first of the month. By doing that you'll get your site posted on the major web sites. It takes a while to get them to show up, but perseverance will prevail. Make sure you use good key words.
Keep up the good work, I'll check back. Darn nice job.

Big Splash · #6 (**permalink**) August 19th, 2003

Thanks for tip on the easy web site at bigfishtackle, I just played around with some images I had stored and some quick text. I'll go in and modify most of the site in the future, but It shows what a total pc rookie can do in a few hours. Thanks to TU I can get these great tips.
I don't see the www.siteadd.com thing you speak of in your other site, but I will have to get that figured out when I get the "real" site running.
http://myweb.ecomplanet.com/BISL5958

Uncle Wes · #7 (**permalink**) September 30th, 2003

Now I'm new to the board and don't want to over step any boundries, but I also offer other things on my site such as camping information, regulations and other info I have recently started a BB for folks to post there trout, salmon, and steelhead fishing reports along with contests/drawings for photo's and reports. The site over all is getting about 10,000 hits a month the new BB is hitting a new high of 1200 hits for the month. Now I guess my point is that I'm not only trying to sell my product but also offering information and places to share info and that seems to bring them back day in and day out.

One other thing is you can have the best site in the world, but if you don't show up in at least the top 20 listings it is all wasted effort. Do your homework on titles,meta tags, and key words these are the key to your success. Links to other sites are very helpful, although they don't carry a lot of weight with the search engines anymore it is still exposure for your site. And exposure is exactly what you want. Just my thoughts.