Day 6: Building a Website 1

SBI diary
I got myself into something realllly strrrretching. I'm doing my own site. Yesterday, I did an outline of content that I will put on that site. I got lots to say there, but I needed to do some research and surfing on the net for similar sites. I spent a whole afternoon yesterday, brainstorming my outline. I first wrote down the topics as they came to me and I did a kind of mind mapping. I think this is the easiest part of writing, but the writing itself is the test of my endurance. (I kept thinking that I should be spending those hours writing my book instead. Maybe if I pay someone like SBI who will force me to write, and will take me to a step-by-step arm-yourself-just-do-it prompts, I can finally come up with a real book.)

Anyway, I made a table of three columns and twenty rows (corresponding to 20 article titles following SBI’s suggestion that I need to complete at least 20 pages before I proceed to day 7). I filled the first column with probable topics and came up with both Tier 2 and Tier 3 topics (I think tier comes from the word tie which means connect or knot with-that's the idea) plus bonus E-zine article topics I could use for Blog-it or something. The second column simply identified my titles as either Tier two or Tier 3 and I had arrows where I tried to show myself which should connect with which. The third column contains "monetization" ideas (SBI terminologies here). Hmmm, I have very few money-making ideas, but maybe later, I can come up with more ideas. Just proves I’m no businesswoman. I’m trying to be. It’s a good choice for freelancers to go online and sell their services on the web. Sitebuildit helps.

Today, I wrote a page again, from 8:00 in the morning to about 10:30. I worried about the following things, formatting: I don’t know where to find the bullets and all those bold-ing and italize-ing and underline-ing codes. So I simply worked my way using dashes and the only HTML I know so far
for line break. Then I told myself that well, I will find those in due time, the most important thing is to finish one page of content a day.

I spend the rest of the half day reading some posts at the SBI forums and learned something about linking from a certain Debs. Got great ideas on footers from a certain Natasha and I printed those out as others at the forum did. I'm learning something here which I did not intend to learn in the first place. And the process itself becomes a challenge. Surely, I am being stretched to my limits, all my editing skills, and copywriting skills, and even proofreading skills are put to the test. Imagine, I'm writing a website! That's new. Tomorrow, I will build another page but first, how do I create a Tier 3 page. Is that supposed to be shown in the NAV Bar too?

I’m glad that I’m not the only confused gal in this adventure. As I visited the forums, I am encouraged that, well, everybody from all over the world is confused about one site-building point or another. So I'm not alone in my stupidity. I know that once I get the drift here, my site will evolve. I just pray that I won’t lose the stamina for writing very technical content pages.

It’s more fun to be a poet though.