Well lets say you have decided that yes you want a website. Lets put aside the technical aspects of design and coding for a minute and figure out what it really takes to run a website.
First off you will need content and lots of it. You have to give people a reason to come to your site. Starting a site for a business and think content isn’t a big issue for you? You still need pages of content that someone will have to write and as a business it will need to be top quality or people won’t have faith in your commitment to excellence. Starting a site about a topic of some sort can be even tougher. So you are a buff of some sort, be it history or art and you think you could write about those topics with ease? Sure the first few pages may fly out like hotcakes, but then you start to get bogged down, other things take up your time and soon you find that your way behind on your writing.
Once you have your topic figured out and a domain name registered and your site up and full of content you will then need to get people to your site. Sure eventually you will get picked up by the search engines if you don’t do anything to promote your site, but wouldn’t you want to help kick-start the process. Sure having quality content will drive traffic to your site naturally, but that process can be time consuming and depressing for the enthusiastic crowd. There are plenty of ways out there to help jump start the process by proper search engine optimization and link building, but much of this takes a lot of time and research into how to do it right. Sure there is social bookmarking and other methods of generating traffic, but most of those don’t produce the kind of traffic you are probably after.
Eventually you will want to have your sites maybe turn a small profit for you. After all you are doing all this work and you aren’t getting paid by the hour. You will spend countless hours working out which advertising or other monetization methods best fit your abilities and needs. How nice would it be if your site would pay for itself and you would never have to come out of pocket again to re-register your domain or pay your hosting bill. Its every budding webmasters dream, even better if you can put some money in your pocket. But simply adding some ads to your content does not guarantee you will make any money from it, you have to work on driving the right kind of traffic to your website.
After all this is done you may find yourself looking back and saying, “Was this all really worth it?” Now I am not trying to discourage you from going ahead with your dream, but just trying to prepare you for the reality that goes along with it. Good luck with your site if you are going to build one, you may find you need it.
