The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I have been preparing my first ebook in PDF format. I downloaded Open Office to produce the ebook because one can export as PDF from the open source Office Suite. The book is titled Website Basics and contains some information that I hope will be of value to those interested in owning a website.

I sent a preliminary copy to Jo at Magic Mega MoneyMakers. She not only offered an opinion on the quality of the book but also did a through proof read and made a couple of suggestions for improvements to the book. I have taken care of the typos and reworded a few awkward passages. I also added a bit of explanatory content.

I am producing this ebook in the hope of generating some traffic to my Before You Buy a Website site. I will offer the ebook as a give away in an article marketing campaign to try to build some traffic to this site. I will offer the opportunity to sign up for an email list, but not require the sign-up at this time. If I build some traffic and don’t get names for the list I may produce another ebook and require an opt-in to download the second book.

The revised PDF is on the server. If you would like a sneak preview go to the DownLoad Page. If you check out the PDF please leave a comment. Thanks!

I have been working on an update to my site Before You Buy a Website. I have added a section on website basics. This is a series of overview articles on many facets of owning and operation a website. They are designed to introduce a prospective webmaster to some of the common terms and concepts of the industry.

These articles cover many topics from the planning stage on through the development and uploading of a website. There are many things to think about. The articles introduce prospective website owners to concepts that they may not have thought about. How can you ask a question about something if you don’t know that something exists? This is phase one.

At some point, if there is a demand, I may go on to phase two. Phase two would examine some of these topics in greater detail and perhaps recommend some solutions to some of the problems. But there are other fish to fry, so I am not going to schedule a timetable for further expansion of the site. I will try to promote this site a bit and see if there appears to be interest.

I looked in on my site, Before You Buy a Website, and decided that there were a few tweaks that could help out there. Things snowballed and I am ending up making some major additions to the site. Since this site is aimed at new would-be webmasters I am adding several articles in a new section called Website Basics. I posted several of these to the web last evening and have written a couple more today.

At the present time I have seven articles planned for the section, but as I go I keep getting ideas for new topics so the section will probably grow. (Make that eight, I just thought of another subject and added it to the list.) These articles will cover topics from ‘What is a website’ to getting the site set up on the web. It is an opportunity to share some of the knowledge that I have gained over the past couple of years.

I located and downloaded the ‘Do Follow’ and ‘KeywordLuv’ plug-ins for WordPress. I will be implementing these on the Before You Buy and Selling on Your Website blogs. These plug-ins will encourage comments and may even build some traffic to these sites. I do have these, and all of my blogs, set to manually approve comments, so we will see how much problem there is with administering the ‘flood’ of comments. You can check the blogs or check back here as I will make an announcement when the plug-ins are live.