What to expect when developing a website or blog

The rewards you get from building a website are exponential. The best bloggers and web designers get to a point where the stuff they already have up is well-known enough to keep traffic coming, and every time they post something new it creates a new wave of interest.

But the “exponential” rewards of building your site work in the negative as well. You see, 1 to the power of 2 is still 1. In fact, 1 to the power of anything—even 1,000,000—is still 1.

What this means is that, especially when you are starting out, you are going to have to work harder for less before you get to a point where the rewards even match the effort you put in.

I’m not trying to discourage you from moving forward—far from it! It’s just that you will have to put a lot of gruntwork into building your own site. If you don’t realize this and you aren’t prepared, you are more likely to give up.

Here are a few things you should expect:

You will need to make sure to devote time to you project. You cannot let it die.
You will need an appreciation for the complexity of your project. Even if you use software that makes the process easier, you still will need to explore many things outside your comfort zone. Coding in several languages (especially HTML, CSS, and some PHP), hosting, server configuration, search engine optimization (SEO), etc. are all going to be part of the process at some point, and you will need a minimum of knowledge of each. This will come with time.
You will need to know how and where to find information quickly and easily. I will post on some of the best places to find this information later on.
You will likely need money. Some people start sites up from scratch on free servers. If that’s all you need, go for it. But if you want more control over your content (including having only your own ads or none at all on your blog), you will need to spend a small amount at least to buy hosting and a domain name.
You will need a good, solid, well-fitting theme. If your site is called Jack’s Arcane Thoughts, is hosted at butteredIdahopotatoes.com, and contains articles about Congolese monkeys, IPhone hacks, and that lousy party you just went to a couple of nights ago, it probably won’t get a consistent audience. Make sure you can easily describe your blog in one fairly concise sentence. Of course, if you really do want to just put all your thoughts on a blog or site, make sure you are in it for the long haul and have a lot of time to dedicate to it, because it’s an awful lot harder.
Before spending a lot of time publicizing, you will need to write some solid content first. If everything else is set to go and you have 3 posts, that’s not enough. Write 15 or 20 good posts to be sure; then you have something to work with.
Write relevant content. Make sure people will want to come to your site. Otherwise, what’s the point?
You need help and partnerships. You can try to do things on your own, but the best way both to learn the newest, best methods and to get traffic to your site is by forming relationships with others. That way, you are not the only one putting time and effort into your project!
Get ready for spam! As soon as your site has a few notable inbound links, the spammers are sure to follow. Make sure you have something in place so you are not overwhelmed (e.g., Akismet if you use Wordpress, or comment deadlines, in which a post no longer accepts comments after a certain amount of time).
Patience. At times your blog or site will seem not to have a great audience, very little in the way of traffic, etc. You just have to hang in there and keep going, without compromising your content or your message. Rome wasn’t built in a day.