Site Planning and Mistakes
lurksteraz on July 16th, 2007
Well, this weekend was like a coding marathon, and now I now have brain fry. Starting Friday night, I wanted to research some niches but the competition for some of them was too much. Then sometime after midnight, I ran across one. It’s one that I like, I can relate to and wouldn’t mind spending a little time on to test it out. And the best part is?, there are a decent amount of searches and nobody is buying ads in Google. Which by the way, I’d like to make a post on keyword search volume tools in another post.
I then went to look for domains and realized I had been sitting on one that would be perfect. Ok, so now I’m starting to put the pieces together.
Saturday morning, I start creating templates and trying to plan a layouts and mapping on how I want this to work. If visitors land on the site naturally, I want to have them flow through the site without abandoning for cheesiness. Good, I’m all set and have a plan.
Saturday afternoon, I start fine tuning my templates for scalability, so in the long run, I can grow the site out if testing and profits are in my favor. I then leave for a little while to spend some time with my wife and baby boy so they would remember who I am.
I return Saturday night and start creating category pages and product pages. I start thinking that this is taking forever, and that there could be a better a way to do this. I should mention that these are products from a Commission Junction advertiser. And since my account is new, I don’t have access to feeds(oi). From what I understand, you need to generate a certain amount of money first before accessing the feeds to merchants. So, if you’ve ever entered products in through CJ, you know my pain.
Sunday morning after entering a ton of products, I realize that I basically reinvented the wheel(ugh). For some stupid reason, I didn’t even think to use a database and dynamically pull in the products. My original thought process was to create maybe 20 or so product pages, and the next thing I know during the long hours is that I was side tracked and started entering way too many products out of excitement for just testing. Although this is good for the long run, but I could have wasted hours and hours of time on something that may not work.
Live and learn I guess. It’s early in the morning here in AZ, and I’m sure this post doesn’t make sense in some parts, sorry…. I just got into work and I’m tired.
