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Comments: 0 Creating a website, part 1.
I get a lot of e-mails asking me how people can create a really great website that will help promote their band, or create community, or whatever. So I'm going to post a series of journal entries detailing the various ideas that you should toss around in your head before, during, and after you're making the next kickass website on the Internet. Feel free to leave comments or questions and I'll do my best to provide advice.

That said, here we go.

If you're trying to learn a bit of webmaster-foo, and you don't already have an idea in your head, consider doing a "fan-site" for something you really like-- a band, a book, a movie, a game. Back in 1995, the SMG site started out as a fan-site which CR just happened to stumble upon (from AOL no less-- feel free to give him shit for being an AOL user at one point in time). In any case, picking a subject matter for your site is probably something best left to you-- I can't give you any advice beyond that.

Before I go into any technical details, this first journal entry is going to concentrate on the overall preparation for the whole process. Assuming that you have an idea for your site, the first thing you need to ask yourself is what you want to put on your site. For the most part, people will come to your site looking for one or two individual pieces of information and it's your job to keep them there. To that end, you need to think about what the most important information is on your site, and highlight that. Sit down one night and draw up a list of things you _might_ want to have on your site. Make the list long -- longer than you could ever possibly hope to actually create.

After you have the list done, pick the top 4 or 5 features -- maybe 6 or 7 if you've done this before -- and throw the rest away. One of the biggest mistakes that I've seen people make is to try to do too much on their site, which winds up reducing the quality of individual items. ("I want a newsgroup, and a mailing list, and an irc channel, and...") Don't worry about your site being too small-- there's no such thing. If your site has only one page, and people read that page and get what they're looking for, your site is an overwhelming success. Look at the success of weblogs -- they're really only one page that relates one specific type of info.

So you have your idea, you have your feature list. What's next? The sitemap. Get yourself some graph paper and draw a small square in the middle of it. That square represents your homepage. Continue to draw squares for each page you want on your site-- "news home", "news article", "discography home", "album artwork", etc etc. Concentrate only on what users will see-- don't worry about making a sitemap for any admin tools that you'll be creating (more on that in a later journal entry).

Don't worry about connecting all of the squares to everything else, either. If I were to draw lines representing the navigation on this site, the sitemap would be a jumbled mess of lines. Just connect squares that represent how you would browse through the site (home -> news home -> news article, etc etc). Also, leave a little space between squares, because I will guarantee you that you'll miss pages. ("Preview post" is one that I tend to miss on every single site I do)

In drawing up the sitemap, you'll come to the realization that your task won't be quite as easy as you originally thought. 4 pages turns into 10 pages really quickly, and 10 pages turn into 30 pages almost as fast. Don't panic-- most of these pages will fall under a few core templates that you'll create. The Amish Rake Fight site is really only two templates with a few small adjustments, so the act of designing the pages was no big deal.

Okay, you have your sitemap, you have your list of features, what's next? Preparation. Here are only a few things that you'll need to consider:

- Hosting
- Programming
- Design
- Administration
- Community
- Maintenance

I can hear it now: "holy shit, I just want to put up a couple of html pages, what do I need to think about all this for?" The answer is this: your site will become popular fairly quickly-- no matter what. Even the smallest sites will get pageviews on a fairly consistent basis so long as they're maintained well. You'll find out that the 3 or 4 html pages that you put up won't be enough, and you'll soon be looking into things like database connectivity, dynamic pages, and newsgroups. Don't worry -- that's exactly the growing pains that I went through.

Up next: hosting for your site.

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