How do you build your quality web sites?

[davidz]

Hello everyone,

I would like to know how many hours you spend on building your site, and how you do it?

I have been on and off working on my sites for the last 2 years, I found it is quite time-consuming.

By looking at the sites posted at Critique section, I am very impressed by the quality of them.

But I listened to one of Joe's tele-conference, he mentioned somebody can virtually build a site in one day. For me, even I use the free articles from article bank, it will take me at least 2-3 weeks or longer.

If you can share with your experience on building the sites, that would be much appreciated!


David

[imbrod]

I think Joel is overreacting. I've been in web developing biz for 5 years (programmer) along with my co-worker (designer) but it never took us less than 3-4 days for the simpliest sites on Earth.

The site that I did totally alone (design+programming) took me some 2 months of my free time: www.all-hosting-guide.com
and I'm still updating it every day.

[Matthew]

I agree with imbrod. I am a web designer and marketer as well and even a simple site (like http://www.useyourgold.com) took me at least a couple of days of work to complete.

What Joel might be talking about is using a pre-made template and entering your own content. You could easily make a website using that method and have it done within a day or so.

Now to answer your first question: I do everything from scratch. I don't like WYSIWYGs (What you see is what you get) editors as they make messy code that is hard to update later. Also I prefer being able to tweak my sites to look exactly the way I want to. I use a simple HTML editor EditPlus (http://www.editplus.com) - I like it's syntax highlighting and that's it.

I get my inspiration for site design by going to free template sites and looking at their templates, and then designing a new template from scratch using some of the good things that I saw in other templates.

All in all web design is not that hard to learn, but it can take a while to master creating a very efficient design.

[WSB]

It depends on the size of the site I think, and how experienced you are at building pages. I have a couple of large content sites with hundreds of pages, and there is no way to do that in a day. But if you want a mini site with just a few pages, it doesn't take long if you've done a lot of pages before and know the procedure well.

[AuctionMan]

If you use a site builder, a unique template and content generating software then a day is easily achievable. Whether these sites have true value is arguable and they tend to be built purely based on getting revenue clicks.

Mike

[Mommy2GG]

IMO, building large quality websites take time as many of you already expressed. Mine is always a work in progress. I never stop adding to them. :)