$10,000 in $100 bills

About a month after I got my first connection to the internet I decided I wanted to build a website. I had no burning ambition to share information, I just wanted to see if I could do it. Bearing in mind I have the technical capabilities of your average goldfish and things weren’t so easy back in 1998, I found it difficult but eventually I did it.

Of course, being somebody who can turn shopping into an Olympic sport, I wanted to make some money from the website. Now, that was really difficult! In those dim and distant days, there were very few opportunities, the main one was Amazon and then it was only Amazon.com.

Now the picture is completely different. There are thousands of affiliate opportunities with all kinds of companies so, today, there is no reason why anybody who has a reasonably popular website, getting a couple of thousand visitors a week, shouldn’t make at least enough from their site to go shopping. Some people are so good at monetising their site or sites, they have made a career from it and have been able to give up the day job.

So how can you make money from your website?

You could try one of the get rich quick schemes advertised all over the web but, remember, if it sounds too good to be true, you can usually bet your life it is. There aren’t that many people making big money from these products and those that do are probably the ones who came up with the original idea. If you want instant wealth, try entering a lottery – your chances are probably better!

More sensibly, you could build a site or write a blog about something that genuinely interests you. If you keep it updated and build up good traffic, then you could find you can earn money from it.

Choosing Your Subject With Money in Mind
One factor is that some subjects are more commercial than others. For example, Ancient Russian Pottery is obviously not a hugely commercial subject whereas a site on popular subject like football or Lord of the Rings or some aspect of travel probably would be more profitable. A popular subject might get more visitors and there are a huge number of specific items and services for sale on these topics. The downside is that you will come up against stiff competition from an enormous number of sites on the same subjects varying from those belonging to big corporations to those of fans.

Amazon.co.uk Warehouse, Glenrothes, Scotland

If you want to earn money from your website, this is something you need to consider.

Think Laterally
With less mainstream subjects, you have to think laterally. OK, Ancient Russian Pottery won’t attract a lot of visitors because it is so specialised but you would need to make the best of those who do come. Books on pottery of all kinds could be offered, travel to Russia is another possibility, perhaps even a language course might be available. So just because your site might not have obvious opportunities for monetising, try thinking outside the box and you might be surprised at what you can find.

Position Ads to Get a Sale
When you put ads on your website, think about how YOU use the internet. Don’t assume that you are the only person that won’t scroll down to look at ads – most people won’t. You need to put your advertisements high up on the page so that people see them (sometimes called ‘above the fold’) even if they don’t read the whole article.

If you mention a book, a DVD or video, or any other product, in an article, put an affiliate text link to it and use the relevant words in the article as the link. You’ll be surprised at how many you can sell and, don’t forget, this will go on working for you long after you wrote the article. This isn’t an invitation to drag the names of all kinds of products into articles because that will be a turn-off to many visitors, but rather to capitalise on natural opportunities.

Book, Movie and Other Reviews
These are interesting for visitors and a natural way for you to put in links to products. Put a link to the item reviewed right at the top of the article and then again at the bottom. Don’t forget to link to Amazon in any countries where the product is available.

Once your site is well established, you can email the marketing department of publishers and ask for review copies. It is best if you do a few reviews first (use your own books or those from the library) so that you can include a link or two to them in your email to show you are serious.

These methods can bring in anything from small, occasional amounts of money up to a good, regular income.

We’ve all seen the sites that make you think “Uh oh, amateur hour”. It’s easy for beginners to make some basic mistakes that give their sites an amateurish look. So how do you avoid giving that impression with your first website? Here are 20 tips to help you.

1. Look at lots of good and bad sites. Try to list what makes them look good or bad.

2. Keep your pages simple. Look at the way good magazines layout their pages.

3. Do not use a vivid colour or frantic pattern for a background. Most people will find it hard to look at any pictures or read text if the background is too distracting.

4. If you don’t want a plain white background, make sure that your text is still readable. A dark or medium blue background with black text will make what you write illegible and nobody is interested enough to strain their eyes – there are plenty more websites out there that they can read.

5. A black background can work but you must make sure your text is white or another very light colour. It is probably best not used for pages where you are trying to give people quite a lot of information.

6. If you use a graphic for a web page background, make sure it is pale and text is readable on it. You must also check your page with different monitor resolutions because it might not work well in a different resolution to the one you use.

7. Don’t go crazy with fonts. Choose ONE easily readable font like Verdana, for example, and use it throughout the site. You could use a more decorative font for headings if you feel you absolutely must.

8. Don’t use lots of big pictures on one page. It will take longer for that page to load and people won’t wait around for slow loading pages.

9. Make sure that any pictures you do use are relevant to the subject of the page and add something to it.

10. Make sure that all pictures are reduced in file size.

11. Learn how to wrap text around pictures and other graphics, long pages with large empty areas alongside graphics just scream amateur.

12. Don’t put your text in a graphic. If you do, it will probably slow down page loading and it will also mean search engines won’t be able to read it so won’t index your page.

13. Try to avoid frames unless you have a good reason to use them and you understand them. They can sometimes hinder rather than help navigation, stop people linking to individual pages on your site and can stop search engines indexing your site.

14. Make sure your menus are consistent throughout your site and make sure that all your pages are accessible from your menu. It’s surprising how easy it is to forget to add a new page to it.

15. Don’t try innovative ideas with your menu. Stick to tried and tested ways of displaying it. If people can’t find your menu or work out how to use it, they won’t stay on your site for long.

16. Never, I repeat, never put ‘under construction’ signs on your website. Nothing screams ‘amateur hour’ louder than this. When people do this, what do they expect? Are they expecting people to come back periodically to see if it’s finished? If they are expecting that, then they are fooling themselves. Don’t do it.

17. Don’t put lots of little icons from various companies dotted around your pages unless you are getting paid to do so. Leave off things like ‘this site was designed to be viewed in Internet Explorer’. Why do you want to give free publicity to Microsoft – do you think Bill Gates can’t afford advertising? Even if you are getting paid or expect to get commission from affiliate advertising, make sure the ads look good on the page and aren’t annoying. Some flashing ads can actually send people off a site in double quick time no matter how fascinating the content.

18. Don’t use a web counter, they really don’t give you any useful information and experienced web users know that. Instead use something like sitemeter.com which has a free package giving you useful information about your visitors like their location, the referring website, top entry and exit pages, etc. Although you have to display a small sitemeter graphic if you use their free package, you can choose a very small one that doesn’t display the numbers if you don’t want visitors to see them.

19. Check and double check your text. Poor spelling and punctuation look bad and, in the worst cases, make an article hard to understand. Remember the best selling book, ‘Eats Shoots and Leaves’. The title comes from a story about a panda that eats shoots and leaves but a wrongly placed comma changes the sense, ie ‘the panda eats, shoots and leaves’. You should know the difference between it’s and its, their and there and that separate is not spelled seperate – a misspelling I see all over the web. Also, please don’t go mad using exclamations marks – one occasionally is OK, if you must, but not at the end of every other sentence and certainly not several at the end of any sentence.

20. Don’t expect a website about you, your family and pets to become a cult attraction. Only your friends and family will want to visit it and maybe not all of them. If you want to do a website, choose a subject that is likely to interest a variety of people even if it’s a minority interest like bungee jumping, camel racing or tiddlywinks then make it the best website on the subject that you possibly can.

Adding pictures and other graphics can lift your pages, add colour and life as well as make them easier to read. They can give novices to building webpages a real headache, though. Here is a simple guide.

The very first step to adding pictures is to make them the correct size for the space on your webpage. This means don’t just click on the picture in your html editor and push it to the right size because doing that doesn’t reduce the file size. If you do that and have a jpg that is 2mb, for example, even though the picture looks smaller, the file size will still be 2mb.

Use a picture editor to reduce the size of the picture which will reduce the file size too. The free Google graphics management program Picasa has a really easy way of reducing the size of pictures and other graphics. Large files take a long time to download when a page opens and people won’t usually hang around and wait for it to happen so it’s really important.

If you want text to flow alongside the picture, this is the code to align right for example:

<img src=”../graphics/blackpool_tower.jpg” width=”250″ height=”314″ alt=”Blackpool Tower and beach, Blackpool, Lancashire” hspace=”10″ vspace=”10″ align=”right”>.

I’ll unpack this tag:

img src=”../graphics/blackpool_tower.jpg” – this says where the picture can be found on the server, it’s in a folder called graphics and the name of the picture file is blackpool_tower.jpg.

width=”250″ height=”314″ – this shows the size and, most important, the picture has been changed to this size before uploading on to the server. While on the subject of picture file sizes, you usually don’t need more than 72 resolution for pictures online and this helps to keep the file size down.

alt=”Blackpool Tower and beach, Blackpool, Lancashire” – this is what people will read if they browse with graphics turned off so they don’t see the picture. They will know what the picture showed. It is also a useful way getting more keywords on to your pages naturally for search engines.

hspace=”10″ vspace=”10″ – this put a 10 pixel space horizontally (hspace) and vertically (vspace) around the picture so text doesn’t go right up to the edge.

align=”right” – unsurprisingly this aligns the picture right. You can have align=”left” instead, if that suits your page better. When you do either of these, the text will display alongside the picture.

Don’t forget that even if you are using an html editor, you can always change the code yourself. For example, you could copy and paste the tag above and substitute your own folder and picture file name. You could change the hspace and vspace to another number and align left. You would, of course, change the alt to your own picture title.

Trying this kind of thing in your code will help you understand more about using html and what happens when you make changes. Even making mistakes can be helpful as long as you eventually understand what the mistake was and what effect it had.

Whether your website is for your business, to give information on a subject you love or just because you want your own website, it is very disappointing if it doesn’t get an audience so it’s worth taking the trouble to get presentation and content right.

Pictures
Many beginners don’t understand the difference between the size pictures appear on a webpage and their file size. Always remember that a digital picture is computer file, usually a .jpg so, to reduce the picture, you must reduce the file size. To do this, you need to use a graphics editor, Google Picasa is a good free option.

The reason that this is important is because a big jpg file will take a long time to load on a webpage and most people will not wait. They will become impatient and click away on to another site that loads quickly.

Similarly, if you put too many pictures on a webpage, it will take too long to load. How many is too many? It depends on the file sizes of your pictures. If you feel a need to use several pictures, you could convert them to thumbnails with a larger picture opening in a separate window when somebody clicks on one of them.

Text
Most people find it more of a strain to read text on a computer monitor than on paper. This is something that anybody who writes webpages must consider. Visitors might not read a long essay, even on the most fascinating of topic, simply because it’s not a good way to present information online. If your topic demands this kind of format, consider giving a ‘print’ option so that visitors can print off the article without all the surrounding ads and banners if you have them. There are also ways of breaking up text to make it easier to read on a screen.

• Use short paragraphs
• Use sub titles where possible so people can find particular information quickly.
• Use bullet points

Don’t make pages too long, people don’t like scrolling down too far unless the page is particularly fascinating. Split a very long page into two or even three pages but make sure you split on natural breaks.

Spot the Spelling Mistake!

Spelling and Grammar
How many times have you looked at a website and seen spelling and grammar mistakes? My guess would be that you have seen this many times.

If you want your site to be taken seriously, you must check for errors. When people see mistakes like these, it can raise doubts in their minds about just how much faith they can put in any information on the site.

Almost everybody has Word, Word Perfect or similar programs with spelling and grammar checkers. Just paste your text in one of these, if you have written it elsewhere, and run it through the checker.

Layout and Design
The way you layout and design your webpage can have an impact on whether visitors read the information on it and whether they go on to other pages on the site.

• People are accustomed to finding menus in the top left of a page or along the top. Don’t decide to be innovative and put it in the bottom right corner of your page or other unlikely position because many people will never notice it and certainly won’t look for it there.
• Don’t put links to other pages on your site in a way that makes them hard to find. For example, nobody is going to spend time hovering their mouse over words or images that might possibly contain a link. Make links obvious.
• If you have a three column layout like this page, don’t write a very short article and then put so many ads in the side columns that they go way below the centre column content. Trust me, nobody will scroll down to look at ads. It looks ugly and amateurish. It shows that you haven’t considered how people use the web.

Flash, Fireworks and Other Technical Effects
Personally, my heart sinks when I’m looking for information and visit a website with a Flash opening page. It’s even worse when I don’t have the option of bypassing it. Then, when I find that the whole site is done in Flash or uses other technical effects to present information leaving me to watch what appears to be little more than a slide show, I quickly decide I’ll find the information elsewhere.

If you must use technical effects, make sure they are appropriate to the presentation of your subject matter and that people can opt out of them and see the plain vanilla version. Not everybody is on a fast, broadband connection or using a fast computer with plenty of memory. If your site causes their computers to freeze, I promise, they will never come back to your website nor recommend it.

The Final Check
When you build your webpages, as you load each one on to your site, check them online. Read the text looking for mistakes. If you aren’t good at spotting them, get somebody else to check too.

Ask yourself if the page looks as good online as it did on your computer. If the answer is no, then fix it. Your webpages could be online for years so it’s worth taking the time to get them right.

Check all your links. Personally, I never type in a link, I always copy and paste but, even so, I always check them by clicking on them. Links that don’t work are annoying for visitors and give a bad impression.