We’ve been discussing web sites and blogs for the last few weeks. Today, I’ll pick up where we left off on Friday. But first, there’s a student in the back of the class waving her hand wanting to ask a question:

Susan asked:

How complicated is updating a blog on a website compared to one on Blogger? Doing it myself is not an option, and since I’m not independently wealthy, neither is hiring a webmaster to add a new post every few days.

Randy sez: It’s just as easy either way. That’s the beauty of blogging — you set it up once, and then when you want to post, you log in to your site and type a blog entry, without having to ask your webmaster to do anything for you. (You have to log in because otherwise, ANYONE could post entries to your blog posing as you, and you don’t want that.) It is a bit more work to set up the blog on your own site to begin with, but the rewards are high.

Last week, I posted a list of 9 questions you should ask yourself (and answer) before you ever start designing a web site or blog. I’m discussing each of these in more detail now, because your answers determine what kind of site you’ll want to create, the technology you’ll use, and how much time, energy, and money you’ll have to expend.

Question #4 is going to generate some controversy, I’m sure. I’ll discuss some possible answers to this question:

4) How “pretty” do you want your site to be?

Answer a) Extremely beautiful and cutting edge, with lots of motion and graphics

Randy sez: If this is your answer, the next question you should ask yourself is “Why?” This kind of site is going to be expensive. It’ll be hard for you to change, unless your webmaster takes care to make it easy for you to change. (For example, if he installs a blog in the site, that part of it will be easy for you to add content to. But the rest of the site may be far beyond the skills of mortals.) If the webmaster does it in Flash, the site may not even be indexed by the search engines. Remember, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but search engines still think in terms of words. I have seen web sites in which all the text was actually a picture of text. Search engines won’t index that, because they can’t see it.

Answer b) Professional looking

Randy sez: Professional looking is good, as long as it doesn’t detract from your goals. It is not my job, of course, to tell you your goals. It may be that your goals are in line with a professional-looking web site. Be sure that they are before you pay for one, because again, it’s going to cost you money if it’s a full-blown site. You can of course get a beautiful looking blog at no cost, because all the blogging sites have great-looking templates.

Answer c) Nice looking

Randy sez: There’s actually a continuum from super-glitzy sites down to professional down to nice looking down to awful. The nicest looking ones generally cost the most. The key thing is to figure out just how “pretty” it needs to be to do the job. Which means you have to define what “the job” actually is.

Answer d) As long as it doesn’t look like the south end of a north-bound rhino, it’s fine

Randy sez: This kind of a site will cost you even less. This is the kind of site you usually do yourself, using FrontPage or DreamWeaver or whatever, including the graphics. Sites like this can look “OK” but they are going to make a statement about you. Be sure that the statement your site makes is the one you want it to make.

Answer e) I don’t care if it’s ugly as sin

Randy sez: We have all seen incredibly ugly sites. The possibilities are endless: Pink text on blue background. Flashing banners. Dancing text. Tiny text that is fixed at fifteen inches wide. Unreadable Olde English fonts (or a handwritten font in gold ink on a white background.)

The question is whether a great-looking site or a horrible monstrous site makes a difference.

Of course, that’s an impossible question to answer. “Makes a difference” in what way?

Let me point you to a few different web sites, all of whom belong to tremendously successful internet marketers.

Tom Antion’s site. This is a pretty primitive site, as Tom himself will tell you. He did it himself in FrontPage, and it looks like it. But Tom’s laughing all the way to the bank, earning millions of dollars from that site and others like it. Tom is one of the best internet marketers I know. He’s not a techie. He’s a marketer. I’ve learned a ton from him.

Alexandria Brown’s site. Ali Brown is the “E-zine Queen” and she does a great job of teaching how do an e-zine. I learned most of what I know about doing e-zines from her. Notice that her site is pretty basic. It’s one page. The movie at the top looks squashed in my browser, though it might look fine in other browsers, I haven’t checked. Ali makes a lot of money from her site also. Why? Because she gives away good solid info and she has a good line of products to sell.

James Brausch’s new blog. This site is just a blog. It’s got a clean, utilitarian design. There are no Flash intros or glitzy graphics. James is a leading expert in such things as traffic, copywriting, and product creation. And if you look at his blog, you’ll see he spells that out: “Traffic + Copywriting + Products = Successful Internet Business”. He also makes a ton of money, and he deserves it, because I don’t know of anyone better at some of the things he does.

Perry Marshall’s web site. This is another small site. Notice that it doesn’t look like Perry spent a ton of money on a webmaster. It looks like it could have been done in FrontPage. Perry, by the way, is one of the world’s leading authorities on using Google AdWords as an advertising service. If found Perry a couple years ago when I wanted to find out more about AdWords. So I checked to see whose ad on AdWords placed highest. I figured those people would be the experts. Perry was right up there among the top 2 or 3.

What’s the moral of the story here? You can have an immensely effective web site or blog without having a “pretty” site. Of course you can an immensely ineffective site or blog that isn’t pretty. From what I can see, there’s not a lot of correlation between “pretty” and effective, at least if you define “effective” to mean “earns money.”

I am sure that many people are now going to tell me that a web site or a blog for a novelist is “different” and that it’s more important for a novelist to have a “pretty” site than for a mere million-dollar earning business mogul. I would be interested to hear why that is so.

Yesterday, I posted a LONG discussion on how to figure out the requirements for your web site. I made a list of 9 questions you should answer before you ever start designing your site. I’d like to discuss those next.

Craig wrote:

I’m teaching a course on web design for homeschooled middle and high schoolers. Could I use your list of questions in this post with them?

Randy sez: Yes, just tell them where you got them. By the way, folks, if you’re finding this discussion useful, go ahead and spread the word.

OK, let’s look at that first question on the list I made yesterday, along with the possible answers. For each answer, I’ll tell you what design constraints that’s going to impose on you.

Question 1) What is the purpose of your web site?

Answer a: To let me express myself

Randy sez: If that’s your only goal, then you may not need more than a blog. If that’s one of your goals, then a blog should probably be part of your site.

Answer b: To let me tell the world about myself

Randy sez: Again, a blog might fill the bill here, depending on how much there is to say about you. Or you might want a small web site with a few pages (unless there is just an awful lot about you that needs saying).

Answer c: To tell the world about my books

Randy sez: A blog could in principle do this, but most authors with a few books want a web site with one page per book. Be aware that the world quite honestly doesn’t CARE that much about your books, so you should think seriously about making your site about more than just your books.

Answer d: To market my books

Randy sez: If you actually want to MARKET your books using your web site, then you’ll be wanting to attract people to your site who never heard of you. That means you need a way to bring in traffic to your site, and it should be free traffic, because you simply can’t afford to pay for traffic on the royalties from your books. Attracting traffic means that your web site needs to be about MORE than just your books. (Otherwise, the only people who come to your site will be people who ALREADY know about your books, and that’s not really marketing, is it?)

Answer e: To market other products or services

Randy sez: The same goes here as for Answer d above. Depending on the profit margins for these products and services, you might be able to pay for traffic using something like Google AdWords. But it’s always better to get free traffic than to pay for it, so it still makes sense to make your site about something that will bring in traffic. More on this later.

Answer f: To give away my ideas for free

Randy sez: That’s very altruistic! Good for you! Giving away ideas for free is a Good Thing To Do, and I highly recommend it. I’ll note that you aren’t required to give away every one of your ideas for free. You can give away some and sell some. I happen to think this is a smart thing to do. You might very well get a lot of free traffic, you’ll definitely do something good for the world, and you will earn enough money so you can afford to come up with more ideas to give away for free. It can turn into a vicious circle of goodness if you don’t watch out!

Answer g: Some other purpose

Randy sez: Oh, that’s helpful. Make sure you know what that purpose is, because it will determine what sort of site you need.

Answer h: Any combination of the above

Randy sez: Figure out which combination it is, and then read my remarks above for each one that applies.

That’s enough for one day. We’ll look at the next couple of questions on my list tomorrow.

Today, I’d like to talk about a critical task which you MUST do before you create your web site: Designing the site. Before I get into that, I’ll answer a couple of quick questions that came in since I last blogged:

Mary asked:

How do you truly measure your hits? I get about 200 hits a day on www.wannabepublished.blogspot.com, but I also have about 100 subscribers to it via feedblitz. Is it accurate to say I get three hundred hits a day? Or do hits only mean actual fresh hits?

Randy sez: I don’t know exactly how Blogspot counts hits, so I can’t answer this accurately. My blog is hosted on my web site, so I use the web statistics package on my site and just count the page views for the various blog pages over a one-week interval. Then I divide by 7 to estimate the daily readership. By the way, one should always count PAGE VIEWS, not HITS. A page view is one reader looking at one page. A page might contain dozens of graphic elements or JavaScript files, each of which is technically a “hit” (i.e. a separate file that has to be loaded by your server). If you had a thousand little graphic files on a page, then every time a reader loaded that page, they’d generate 1000 hits! But who cares? What you care about is the number of humans you have reading your pages (and how long they stay on the page–a minute is typical).

Mary added another question:

Randy, one more question. Does Technorati Rank and Authority really mean something? I mean, gee, will I get some cash prize for good numbers??

Randy sez: Yes, they both mean something. For those of you not familiar with Technorati, check it out at www.Technorati.com. It’s a blog-ranking service, kind of like the book-ranking on Amazon.

Your “Authority” is a count of the number of other blogs that have linked to you in a set time interval (if I remember right, it’s the last 180 days). I just checked, and my current Authority is 85.

Your “Rank” is your position in the sorted list of the “Authority” of all blogs registered with Technorati. My “Rank” right now is 81,766, which means there are 81,765 blogs with higher “Authority” than mine. There are supposed to be about 60 million blogs on the planet, so a “Rank” in the top 100,000 is quite good. I have friends with “Ranks” down around 4000, so I have a ways to go.

I don’t pay much attention to either of those numbers. I do pay a bit of attention to how much traffic comes to my web site.

Now on to the question of design. This is prompted by an email I got today from Susan, who gave me permission to answer her question her on my blog:

I checked out Go-Daddy and learned they not only provide domain names, but will also build a site complete with blog. Since I am technically challenged, this has a certain appeal. For about $170.00, I can register my domain privately, get a website, blog, and a free SSL certification.

Is this a good deal? Once the site is done, do they publish it on the web? (Sorry, I’m showing my ignorance.) Also, how do you
register for the search engines?

Randy sez: Whether this is a good deal or not depends on what you want in a web site/blog. You MUST decide this first!

As most of my blog readers know, I worked for years and years as a designer of scientific software (and I still do a bit of work as software architect for a small high-tech company in San Diego). The difference between a good design and a GREAT design can be a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs. It can make a difference of a factor of 10 or 100 in speed. It can be the difference between getting an approximate answer and getting the RIGHT answer. One of the reasons I love design is that it is exceptionally HARD, and it’s never clear if you did the best possible design. There’s always more to learn.

Before you can even begin designing any kind of software (remember that a web site is software that people will use to get information you create for them), you need to know what the requirements of your software are. Here are a few of the many questions you should ask, along with some possible answers you might give. None of these answers are right or wrong, so long as they are YOUR answer.

1) What is the purpose of your web site?

• To let me express myself
• To let me tell the world about myself
• To tell the world about my books
• To market my books
• To market other products or services
• To give away my ideas for free
• Some other purpose
• Any combination of the above

2) How many pages do you want to have on your web site?

• Just one “home page”
• Just one page with a blog on it
• Between one and ten pages
• Between ten and a hundred pages
• Between 100 and 1000 pages
• More than 1000 pages

3) How often do you want to add content to your web site?

• Several times per day
• Every day
• Several times per week
• About once per week
• About once per month
• Hardly ever
• Never; I want it to be unchanged forever

4) How “pretty” do you want your site to be?

• Extremely beautiful and cutting edge, with lots of motion and graphics
• Professional looking
• Nice looking
• As long as it doesn’t look like the south end of a north-bound rhino, it’s fine
• I don’t care if it’s ugly as sin

5) How interactive do you want your site?

• I just want to show information; the user just needs to be able to get from one page to the others by clicking links
• I may have a few forms on my site, (for example, a form that sends email)
• I want fancy graphics that move around; show me some glitz, Baby!
• I want my users to be able to leave comments (for example, comments on a blog)
• I want users to be able to enter information into databases so my site can display that or do computations (for example, an income tax calculating web site)

6) Can you do the techie stuff?

• No, I can’t do it and won’t learn; I want to pay somebody else to do it all
• No, I want to use a simple Sitebuilder web site that I can use to create my site without paying anybody; I understand that this means I can’t make super complex sites, but I just want something simple for now
• No, I need somebody to set it up, but I’d like to be able to make a few small changes, if somebody shows me how
• No, I need somebody to set it up, but then I want to learn how to do fairly major things
• No, but I can use one of those programs like DreamWeaver or FrontPage that does all the hard stuff; I’m willing to spend some time to learn to use them
• No, but I can learn how to hand-code my pages; just tell me what books to buy!
• Yawn, of course! I know HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, SQL, Ruby, Perl, Java, or I can learn them from a book

7) How much do you want to spend on your site?

• I want a free site
• Nothing up front, and less than $10 per month for maintenance
• A few hundred bucks up front, and as little as possible for maintenance
• A couple of thousand dollars up front, and less than $100 per month after that
• Cost is no object; give me the best!

8 ) When do you want your site done?

• Yesterday, when my book came out!
• Today would be great
• This week
• This month
• Within the next few months
• Someday
• I have a web site, but it needs revamping

9) Do you want the search engines to bring visitors to your site?

• Yes
• No, I could care less about search engines
• I have no idea, but I suppose it sounds good

There are probably several other questions, but you get the idea. The above set of questions define your “Requirements.” It is impossible to design a web site effectively until you’ve spent some time figuring out your requirements.

I’ll say it again: There are no right or wrong answers for any of these questions. Your requirements are your requirements. Don’t let somebody else tell you what they should be. Most of all, don’t let a web designer tell you what your requirements should be. It’s your site, your name on the site, your money paying the bills. You get to decide.

Be aware that not all possible combinations of answers make sense. If you want a fancy site that has lots of user interactivity and you want somebody else to do all the work, it ain’t gonna be cheap or quick, Baby!

Over the next few days, I’ll talk a bit about what your design options are for various sets of requirements. At some point, I’ll come back to Susan’s question and try to give an intelligible answer.

Stay tuned! There’s a lot more for us to talk about. If you have any questions about Requirements, go ahead and post a comment here and I’ll try to answer it at the appropriate point in the discusssion.

A quick note to let everyone know that I have sent out the latest issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine last night. If you missed it, your ISP may be filtering my emails so you don’t even see my e-zine. 🙁

I have archived the latest issue on my site in the usual place:
www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com

Have fun!

Tonight, we’ll continue our discussion here of blogging and web site development.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been discussing the nuts and bolts of blogging. My last post, Content is King, brought in quite a range of questions which I’d like to answer today.

Pamela had a good report on an issue we talked about about a week ago:

End result is that I now will have control over my own site, so there is a happy ending! It’s because of Randy’s blog here that I was motivated to see how I could resolve things. Thanks, Randy.

Randy sez: Great to hear that, Pamela! Good things happen when you take action, and I’m glad you’ve got control of your site again. You still will have a lot of work, but at least you’re no longer log-jammed.

Charlotte wrote:

It is amazing how well you can build traffic to a blog just by posting every day, Monday through Friday. My work blog has gone from 68 hits the first month to nearly to over a 1000, during the holidays when there were no new posts and the college was closed for two weeks.

Since I have started back in January, we have had almost 2200 hits. Now, this blog is supposed to drive traffic back to our catalog website so people will register for classes, and my boss wants good information about what is going on at the college, and especially in our division. But the fact that it is hosted at wordpress.com means that there are aspects I don’t control, and I have no access to our web catalog at all, so I can’t track whether a person who comes through my blog and clicks to the catalog actually buys something. I also can’t set up any kind of autoresponder.

It is important to have access and control of your blog.

Randy sez: That’s an excellent growth record. Just keep building on that. Marketing is something that builds slowly from something small into something big. It doesn’t usually happen overnight. You’ll see results in time. It would be good if you can find a way to track your results, of course.

Sally wrote:

How do you hit a nerve that gets comments on a blog? Feedback is nice, but is it the goal? If there is no feedback, does that mean that no one is connecting with your thoughts, or that what you said is so self-explanatory that it needs no further explanation?

Randy sez: Only you can define your goals. Comments may or may not be important to those goals. If you have lots of comments on your blog, you have to read them, monitor for spam, and respond to them. So some bloggers don’t want comments and may even turn them off. I like comments because it enables my blog readers to interact with me and with each other. This is what some people call “creating community.” I think it’s a good thing. I learn a lot from my blog readers, and you all are able to help each other even when I don’t know the answer. I have no idea if it pays off in terms of dollars, but money is not my only goal in life. I have always believed that friends are more important.

So to answer Sally’s question, you should decide whether you WANT comments first. Is your blog about a topic where comments would be a good thing or a bad thing? Only you can decide that. If you decide that you want comments, then there are ways to solicit them. Ask a question of your readers that’s open-ended. Have a contest. Those always seem to generate a lot of comments.

Camille wrote:

I wondered the same thing as Sally. I wonder if Randy would share what his actual hit count is vs the number of posted comments. I bet it’s huge.

I was worried that Gail Martin was going to get lonely and pull her writing blog (www.writingright-martin.blogspot.com) because very little comments being posted…and why the heck not??? It’s full of great writing tips….for free! I started to spread the word about her blog. But she assured me her hit counter – or whatever the techie term for it is – showed plenty of readership. Whew. I didn’t want to lose a good, free thing.

She’s got Randy’s give-away-the-gold thing down. I think the fact that she gives away great writing advice will do nothing but help her while it helps others. She has a new book out that complements her blog content, but there’s no hard sell. You’ll either be interested in it, or not. Like pro wrestling.

Randy sez: I don’t look at my stats too often, but what I remember from mid-January, when I last looked was the following: About 500 people per day read this blog. I have about 1100 unique visitors to this site per day. They view a total of about 3400 pages per day. All of those numbers are substantially higher than a year ago. I launched this blog in April last year, and that was the catalyst for some of the growth. I also moved my Snowflake page to this site in June or July, and that has brought in a lot of readers also.

Camille mentioned Gail Martin’s blog. Gail is a friend of mine, and I have a link to her blog from my blogroll. Her content is EXCELLENT. I remember when she launched it how impressed I was about how well she “gives away her gold.” I’ll probably have Gail on as a guest sometime soon. She’s on my list of potential guests (I have a couple of dozen folks who’ve volunteered, so I won’t run out of guests soon.)

Rachael wrote:

After reading your posts about Simpleology, I signed up and have just completed 101. I’m in the process of mapping out my ultimate life, targets, etc. and have a couple of questions about how you did it.

I’ve noticed I can only have ONE short term, mid term, and long term target. Did this really frustrate you? Did you try to ‘get around’ it and add more in each field? Did you decide to go with the flow and truly only pick one target to work on the for whole week.

It’s completely unrealistic to me to only work on one target. There’s a lot more I want to do with my life that isn’t related to that target. Eg, if my goal is to write 15 pages per week of my manuscript, what about my goal to go in a triathlon in six months (as a way of losing weight and getting fit)?

How did you approach this?

Randy sez: I just reworked my Major Targets in Simpleology a few days ago. Yes, it is frustrating when you want to achieve everything all at once, but I have become more convinced than ever that I can really only have ONE target at a time in my life that’s most important.

Understand that I have many things that are going on all the time. I eat, I sleep, I pick up the mail, I do my daily chores around the house, I work at my consulting job, and a host of other routine things. These are HABITS. I do them every day without much thinking about them. They chew up some of my time.

There are also things that pop up that need doing NOW. That dentist appointment I made six months ago comes due. The “Change Oil” light comes on in my car. The garage gets too messy for words, and I take an hour to clean it up a little. The dog comes down with rabies. These aren’t habits, they’re INTERRUPTIONS. I deal with them when they come up and then get back to my routine.

Simpleology just assumes that these will come up, so it lets you schedule them into your life. But the purpose of Simpleology goes beyond dealing with HABITS and INTERRUPTIONS. Simpleology assumes that you want to ACHIEVE something in your life. Something that is going to take a big commitment from you for a substantial period of time, until you reach your goal. And the thesis of Mark Joyner, “The Simpleology Guy,” is that you should only have one of these ACHIEVEMENTS at a time that you’re focusing on. I think he’s right.

Let me illustrate. For the past several months, my long-term Major Target has been to get my next book published. In order to reach that, I had a medium-term Major Target to write a Snowflake, a proposal, and sample chapters, and get them ready for my agent. I achieved that over the weekend. (Hooray! It’s a big relief to get that done.) Now I’m shifting gears, because the next aspect of my long-term Major Target is to write the rest of the novel. That is best done by making a HABIT to write one scene very day. That’s going to take a few months, and it’s really on autopilot now. All I have to do is write that scene every day.

So over the weekend, I shifted focus back to this web site and its associated business. So now I have a new medium-term Major Target that involves creating a couple of new products and releasing them. (I won’t say just yet what they are.) That requires some focused effort or it’ll never get done. So that’s what I’m going to be focusing on. I identified four specific short-term Major Targets that I want to achieve in the next two months. Once those are done, I’ll decide on a new medium-term Major Target.

I really think a person can only FOCUS on one thing at a time. Of course, you can DO many tasks at once. I routinely do 8 to 10 tasks every day. But most of those are either HABITS or INTERRUPTIONS. Only one or two are the thing I’m focusing on. That’s all most of us can do in these busy lives of ours–find time to do a couple of tasks that are related to our passion. If you split your focus, then you just slow things down and prevent yourself from achieving what you want.

By the way, I finished the Simpleology course on blogging and found that it was a very useful summary. There was a lot of good information on how to use your blog to earn money, and some of it was new to me. I’m now taking the Simpleology course on “Viral Marketing Theory” and it looks like I’m going to learn a lot from this one.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Simpleology folks (besides the virtues of keeping things simple), it’s that succes in life comes from continuous improvement. If you were able to improve by only 1% every day, at the end of a year, you’d improve incredibly. (Not by a mere 365%, either. Because of the compounding effect, you’d improve by over 3700%!) So since September, I’ve been trying to make small improvements every week. (Every day is a bit much, but every week is really doable.)

Getting back to Rachael’s question, it sounds to me like writing 15 pages per week is a good solid habit, but it’s not really a Major Target. It sounds like doing that triathlon is a good long-term Major Target for you. You probably have a whole series of short-term and medium-term Major Targets along the way. Go fer it! Reach those Major Targets! Check them off! Keeping knocking them off until you do that triathlon. By that time, maybe the manuscript will be done, and you might then want to focus on getting it published as your next Major Target. At that point, you’ll be fit and trim and will likely have more energy than you do now and will be well able to tackle your next goal. Then daily exercise will become a mere habit that you do every day, and you’ll be focusing for a few months on pursuing publication. Make sense?