Building Websites - Website Building

So do we want to make money or arse about coding?

Content management systems have their place. Of that there is no doubt. However this isn't the place or the time.

If you want to make money you have to put aside all of the distractions that stop you from doing it. This includes trying to learn technologies that you don't need to learn.

Sure it would be great to have an army of users logging into your site and contributing all of the content for you, but for your first money making site it's just not practicable.

If you insist on using a CMS to build your site then take note of some of the ideas I present here and learn from my mistakes. Don't copy them.

Firstly choose Joomla as your CMS. It's the most rounded publishing system that there is available right now. There are other CMS that are good at doing different things but from a publishing perspective in terms of actually publishing content Joomla is the best.

Don't waste weeks comparing different CMS and all that crap. Choose Joomla and get on with the job.

Where Joomla is let down is in it's core ability to be able to manage user groups. You are either a "registered" user, "unregistered" or an "admin". There is no provision for setting up user groups and assigning those groups access to specific content.

So if you were thinking of setting up a subscription website then you need to use a third party add on to do the job for you.

This is where things start to get messy.

If you install the latest release code on your site then you "should" be reasonably safe from hacking attempts. Don't dismiss this threat. Hacking attempts are very real and you should do all you can to guard against them.

Once you install a thrid party "add on" to your CMS you are introducing a potential security threat. especially if it is in any way modifying the original files.

What usually happens is that you run your site for six months or so quite happily and then a new release of the CMS get's issued to take care of any new vulnerabilites. The trouble is that the third party add on you installed now has to be upgraded to work with the new version. If they are slow at getting this developed then you are without a working site until they do.

People who install loads of third party add on's to make their site do more and more wonderful things are particularly at risk from this and can end up spending large parts of their day every day fixing it.

If you are going to use a CMS keep it to the bog standard release specification unless you have access to programmers or someone who knows what they are doing, otherwise you will fill a great hole in the Ether with your wasted time.

That's the main negative for using a CMS.

Here is the second one:

Google analytics (or any other tracking system) requires that you insert a few lines of javascript code to track your visitor sessions. If you keep changing your site template then you keep losing this code unless you remember to keep inserting it of course. It's just too easy to break things. One comma inserted in the wrong place can disable the whole of your site and unless you know what to look for you can waste days trying to fix it.

User or session tracking is an absolute must for making money. If you can see what content your users are interested in and that in which they are not you can start tailoring your site to fit. If you keep losing your tracking stats then you haven't got a hope.

Decide on a theme and stick to it. Even if you hate it after six months or so.

Lastly, keep a record of all of the changes you make to your CMS. For example you may want to remove the "pathway" which displays on every page:

>home>category>news>interest rates

You do this by modifying the index.php and removing the "mospathway" bit.

After a while you will have made many changes and it will have taken you absolutely ages to figure out how to do even small things. Keep a record so that you can do it easily next time around.

However, if you are serious about making money then take my advice and don't use a CMS. You are letting yourself in for a whole heap of time consuming trouble.

Next - let's start organising these pages so that they start earning their corn