Diary Of An Apprentice Webmaster
 by: Geoff Davies

The first three months

Over the years I have built a number of websites, more out of curiosity to see if I could do it, rather than for any real serious commercial need. I have also had a couple of sites professionally constructed for various business ventures that I have been involved with.

However this year I naively decided to attempt to construct my own site with the idea of selling advertising space and maybe some downloadable software.

Eventually I acquired a domain name, www.infidelityresources.co.uk and some web space and through a torturous process discovered how to upload my files, and I could find my website online.

I experimented and wrestled with, and finally gave up on using Microsoft FrontPage and eventually located a very simple programme called NVU from Linspire Inc which allowed me to construct a simple website without any fancy tricks and finally after a week or so completed a very simple six page site.

Now I sat back and waited for the visitors to flood in, only they didn’t, the flood was more of a trickle, and no high rolling advertisers or anyone desperate for software to download.

In fact most of my visitors were lost souls accidentally finding the site on the way to somewhere else and who left as quickly as they arrived.

Search engines. That was where I was going wrong; I needed to get my site on a search engine, looking back now I really had no idea. I did a search for search engines and found thousands, some of the results mentioned free submissions so I tried it and all of a sudden I was getting emails, ezines, newsletters by the bucket load every day, all of which I read avidly.

A new world opened up for me, SEO, what the heck was that, spiders, affiliates, text links, Google Adsense, now they all sounded interesting.

There were however some things which I did not understand, what on earth was content! was that not the stuff I wrote?

I suddenly realised that perhaps I could make money with my website, thus far all I had done was spend, albeit not very much, a domain and web space was not expensive but I was still down on the deal.

I don’t recall how it happened but I noticed a link on the bottom of a website for an online dating company which said affiliates, I clicked on it read everything, had a look at their banners, some of which matched my website colour scheme and decided to apply.

I filled in the on line form and pressed submit, within a few moments I had email thanking me for my interest and they would be in touch.

A day later I was accepted, I logged on using my new user name and password and selected a banner, and then stopped.

What the heck did I do with this banner?

How did I get it on my site?

I read everything again and again and eventually decided to see if cutting and pasting would work, I made a backup copy of my site and then inserted the banner where I wanted it to appear, It looked good in preview so, with my heart in my mouth I uploaded my new page, and

It worked, it looked great and all of a sudden I was in business.

A few days later I applied for Google Adsense and was accepted, following their simple instructions I inserted the code supplied and uploaded, it again looked good and appeared to work well and within the first weekend I had made four dollars.

At long last I was making money on the Internet.

Now my simple six page website has now grown to sixty plus with a two new pages every day.

About The Author

Geoff Davies is the owner of Infidelity Resources. A novice to the world of Webmastering, but learning quickly, hopefully. Please visit his site at www.infidelityresources.co.uk or contact him at [email protected]