Going down the wrong path.

Got To Have A Plan.

7 of January 2009

I have the domain and the space but I needed to have a plan and some goals, below is the vague list I came up with.

• Try to be honest, transparent and objective, help people.
• Refine the idea so that others think the site is worth visiting, make it useful.
• Stick at it, maintain and update the site for a minimum of two years to see if it has any merit.
• Over that time let it evolve, try new things and features, monitor user habits to see what works.
• Learn about PHP, HTML and CSS.
• Find a way to get detailed site statistics
• Get placed in search engines
• Learn how to increase my search ranking and implement it.
• Make the site finacially self supporting (between jobs remember)
• Try to make a profit by providing a valuable service that helps others.

Over the next few days I looked at several CMS options, I decided to go with !joomla as it looked customisable and had a large community of users. I checked out the interface on its demo site.
By the 13th I had an idea of the layout I wanted, the basic features and how I was going to structure the articles or entries so they remained objective.

On the 13th of Jan I installed joomla to my webspace and began customising it, removing the default content  and adding my own basic content and colours.

I was on the wrong track, I only realised this a few weeks later after learning more about the CMS I chose.

If like me, you have no prior experience with web developement or the CMS technology, then my advice to you is take your time , take a lot of time. Test the CMS at home before diving straight in, test all modules and scripts to find its limitations and strengths. In my case it would have saved me from modifying  ~350 articles numerous scripts etc. I will explain that later.