It's hard.
I started working on (personal) websites about two years ago, that's ignoring the websites I had to create for my college course; especially since the past criteria was very low.
I have been mostly interested in community websites, that revolve around a forum, and feed off a strong member base. It means permanent traffic, good advertising chances and the site will pretty much run itself.
Kinda...
You have to get it up and running first. I have found that so far:
- Forum Hosts are bad, it stops you from doing "anything" you really want, and restricts you to whatever it is they are providing. I learned this early, and created my own website.
- CMS Templates are bad. They might look flash, but it all boils down to one thing, unless you have a specific main topic on your site, your going to need a good template to grab the people!
- Designing websites is hard. This is when my creativity problems comes into play, I have been spending a good month now trying to make my own website design, but of course if I was to pull it off, I would have a lovely custom site to show off.
- If you don't have a proper domain, don't expect traffic. It's as simple as that. Having a subdomain is murderer, but nothing really substitutes a good .com domain.
I'm going to give up for a while, hone my skills. Maybe learn a bit more PHP to increase the amount of integration I can master. As for the website design? How are you supposed to learn how to do that!
On another note, the comment on my last blog post got me furiously working hard to make some sort of acceptable art, just to prove myself wrong. I actually managed to create someone worth looking at. I was pleased, and I got a pounding headache... But that must be a good thing.
=D
