The Simple, Basic Free Site

[MorganGrayson]

We're going to start at the beginning, where all novice webmasters should start. I'm going to free-associate much of this. It's going to come right off the top of my head, which means there will be typs, dangling participles and occasionally ending a sentence with a preposition.

Not to mention some pretty rough talk.

The first of the rough talk: all your life you've been told "anything worth doing is worth doing well" and "do your best work." The first thing I'm going to tell you is what you currently think is your best work is time wasting bullshit that won't make you money.

Take your wonderful graphic and design skills and stick them in a drawer for a while.

You are NOT here to *entertain* the surfer. The surfer is NOT your client. Never in the history of the internet has a surfer ever sent a check to a webmaster. Your SPONSORS are your clients.

You're not here to make "pretty sites" to impress anyone. Nobody is going to "ooh" and "ahh" over your pretty websites. The surfer wants to look at porn...and you want the surfer to get the hell OFF your site and go sign up with your sponsor.

DO NOT EVER put "bookmark this site!" on a free site. Think about it. Do you really want some clown coming back repeatedly, enjoying your 20 or so pics and eating up your bandwith? No, you don't.

Do not put "e-mail the webmaster" on a free site. What in the hell would you want with mail from these people???

There's only THREE kinds of links that belong on a freesite. One, is of course, your thumbs to your big pics. The second is your sponsor links. The third are your linkback buttons to the linksites to which you submitted.

In other words, if it doesn't get you a chance to make money, or a chance to get you traffic, it doesn't belong on your site.

Novice webmasters should always learn the business through building simple, basic freesites. That's what this thread will discuss. No frills freesites.

They will have five pages.
index.html
main.html
gallery1.html
gallery2.html
2257.html

Now, the main and gallery pages will be renamed with keywords. The 2257 info is kept on a separate page, with a tiny link to it at the bottom of the index page, because that gives your site one more page for the spiders to crawl. Your meta tags will be on it. (Spiders are stupid. They'll think it's a content page.)

More to follow. Much more.