Work

This is part 6 of a ‘watch me build a site’ series of posts. Part 5| Part 4 | Part 3 | Part 2 | Part1

Today, i updated the ‘about‘ page on hotelsrevealed.com. I’m always never quite sure how best to explain things. I know i could explain them better, but i also know it require a lot of work to make something look simple.

For a small site like hotelsrevealed.com, i know my audience and i know most of them will spend about 10 seconds on the site. They’ll be coming from google searches and will know exactly what the site is about – it’s exactly what they’re looking for. So i’m not going to get caught up too much in the about page, but i think it explains what the site is about and that’s important for people just stumbling upon it randomly.

I also added some content today. 3 articles revealing 3 secret hotels in London on lastminute.com.

As i was writing, i felt the posts looked a little boring, so i wanted to add in an image or some sort of ‘seal of approval’ sign to show people that the hotels i was listing were 100% confirmed. No guess work or rumours.

So i came up with ‘tested’ type stamp which i’ll place on alongside all hotels that have been confirmed and are no longer secrets hotels. For more about that, check out the about page.

8 days ago i came up with this idea and bought the domain name – hotelsrevealed.com. Today, the site is basically complete and up and running. The hard part is of course adding content and keeping it updated.

So there you go… a step by step guide on how to build a small niche site. How to take an idea and bring it to life for free. You do need skills, you need to know css, you need to know html, you need to able to design… but a few years ago i had none of that. I just had ideas.

I know some of you will be reading this, with ideas and with a slight injection of inspiration. Articles like this inspired me, they gave me an insight in to how people work and what sort of work is invovled in building sites.

It’s not easy, but patience and a good work ethic is all that’s needed. Anyway, this series of posts isn’t quite over yet. There’s another one or two left. I’ve a bit more SEO to do and i also want to set up a twitter account too for the site.