Archive for diyweb.com.au

Mid-term Goals

// May 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal Goals, diyweb.com.au

I intended doing more of a opinion piece today however have something on my mind…

One of my self-assigned tasks for this week was to plan diyweb.com.au.

I have given it some thought however I’m stuck. The way I see it, I have two options.

Option 1 is to do what I said, turn it in to a site with resources on how to set up your own web site. So cover domain names, hostings, CMS (e.g. WordPress) and how to maintain the site. I could use some video (screen casting) showing all this stuff.

This option could provide revenue by selling hosting (either via my own reseller account or affiliate), template affiliates, etc. I could also offer to do all the messy stuff for a fee (but it would only be a small fee I’d say).

Option 2 is to sell preconfigured custom WordPress blogs which people can then self maintain and extend. This was another idea I had for offering locally, initially under a different site. Costs would need to be kept as low as possible as the market would be small businesses starting out online.

Both options have their pluses and minuses.

Pros
 Cons
Option 1
  • set up and forget
  • seen a need on forums
  • could leverage off contacts to upsell other things / cross promote other sites
  • investment in screencasting software?
  • fair bit of setup
Option 2
  • can continue to build
  • develops a long term relationship with customers
  • higher margins
  • more commitment
  • ongoing labour intensive
  • offline marketing required
  • unchartered – could go no where – is there a need?
  • may need time marketing during business hours when I am working

I feel the main deciding factor is which one will help me meet my goals, and this is where I’ve realised that I don’t have my goals really planned.

I know my long term goal, but what’s my mid-term goals?

Long term I know I want to be able to replace my offline salary with an online income but I now need to work out how best to get there.

In the case of diyweb.com.au I have the opportunity to setup a simple site which can give me an experience of launching a site and provide some income, or it might be an opportunity to start developing that income which has the potential to replace my offline salary.

The third option is to do both – go option 1 initially and develop it in to option 2 (maybe using a different domain?).

Hmmm…. back to the drawing board!

Plans for this week

// May 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal Goals, australianwebmaster.com, diyweb.com.au, freecssgallery.com

I need to put some commitment in to getting some things done. This week I am planning to work on the following:

freecssgallery.com

I have left this site for quite some time, in fact the last template added was 7 March. I was expecting a whole lot more traffic to the site than what I am getting, having said that, the site traffic seems to be picking up but it’s still pretty pathetic.

I have a number of CSS template lists bookmarked so it’s just a matter of going through and picking out the ones I think look the best. As I’m using WordPress I can then schedule them to have a new template to appear once a day.

My plan is to do around 30 templates then I can then I forget about it for a month. After that I can the reassess what do with the site.

diyweb.com.au

Not something I do very often but I was looking at the Whirlpool forums over the weekend and noticed a couple of people asking questions about setting up a basic web site. They were getting some pretty unhelpful advice – like go and learn HTML. Valid advice but I don’t think people NEED to know HTML to build a basic web site.

A while back I had an idea for a web site which catered for this type of person, I registered the domain diyweb.com.au but other than setting up the default WordPress install I hadn’t got much further.

The idea is to teach people how to start their own web site on the cheap.

This week I would like to put a bit more thought in to this site. I could easily get carried away with building the site so I want to work out what I MUST have to do to get it up and running. I’m not 100% sure where the income would come from (it might be a community service project? :) ) so I want to control how much time I spend on it.

australianwebmaster.com

Planning on trying to hang back a bit on this one for this week and work on some other sites. Will probably do some posting today (as it always goes dead over the weekend) and then see if I can leave it until the weekend.

Other stuff

  • I have to put together a web design brief for a web site – planning on holding a competition on DigitalPoint for a design. Mainly done however have to come up with some example sites showing the type of stuff I like.
  • I have to re-post a development project on a freelance site after the person we had doing it failed to deliver.
  • I also want to keep up the posts on here, jono.me. It’s a bit of a personal challenge to keep committed to this site like I’ve intended to several times. Over the past week you can probably see a mixture of posts from personal blogs (like this one) to more hints & tips – a little  unsure what I should be posting at this stage. Thinking that the “hints & tips” probably deserve a better location than here but at this stage, just posting something is my goal.