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Six simple steps to take when building your websites and galleries
Earlier today I was reading about the death over the weekend of a well-known American journalist, writer, poet and teacher. This guy was someone who studied writing just as a famous sportsman might study the way he does things so that he can find ways of doing them better and so improve his performance. Over the years this well-known journalist came to realize that good writing and reporting was the result of six simple steps.

Well written text might produce magical results but there was and is nothing magical about producing good text. It's simply a matter of developing your skills and following the six steps.

The more I looked at those six steps the more I realized that they have a place in our industry too. Following them won't automatically improve your sales figures but they will certainly help you produce sites and galleries that are more likely to sell as you develop your sales techniques.

So here are the six steps.

Idea
When you're building a new site or gallery spend a little time thinking about it. Think about the theme, think about how you want to develop the theme and do it before you open your HTML editor. Be prepared to jot your idea down on paper, toss it around in your mind for a while before you start work.

Collect
Assemble all the elements that you want to use and get them ready for inclusion in your site or gallery. Optimize the images, prepare the thumbnails and place them all into the folder that will contain your site.

If you are going to use some special graphics then prepare those too and place them in the folder. Will you be using some banners from your sponsor? Download them from the sponsor's site and drop them into the folder too.

Focus
Decide where the focus of your site will be. If you are promoting a mature site think about what aspect of mature sex you want to highlight. Are you going to highlight their experience or their hunger for hard action? Will you be focusing on the titillation of them cheating on their husbands?

Decide on that focus now so that when you sit down to build your site you won't be trying to cover every aspect of mature sex and failing to adequately cover any of them.

Order
Identify where your site is going to start and where it's going to finish. That may sound rather dumb but once you have your focus you then need to introduce some order into the way you are going to present the images, text and marketing.

In some ways it's just like writing a book. You need to start with an introduction and slowly build up to a climax that will leave the surfers who see your site so hungry for more that they click through to your sponsor.

Draft
Build your site, write your HTML, add in the images, write the text and craft your advertising. Don't rush any part of this stage, take your time because the more effort you put in the more chance you have of making sales.

Pay particular attention to your advertising and don't rely solely on banners to attract the surfer and turn him into a member. .

Revise
All too often we want to get our site up there and making money for us so we rush through the draft stage and then instantly upload it and submit it. Weeks later, when it has burnt a bucket load of bandwidth and produced not one sale we go back and discover that we've made mistakes.

Links might be missing and so there is no way for the surfer to click through to our sponsor. The marketing message might be so weak it's never going to make a sale to anyone.

The free bits - the images that the surfers want to see - might overwhelm the marketing message so the surfers aren't even going to see our advertising.

There are lots of things that we might have done wrong and that we won't see unless we're prepared to revise our work. And the very worst time to revise our work is immediately after we have completed it.

Instead let it sit overnight or get up and go away from it for a couple of hours. Go shopping, have a few drinks with friends, do anything and everything you can to take your mind off the site you have just built.

Then come back to it refreshed and look at it again. If you think the marketing message is weak then improve it. Make sure that all the links work and if they don't then fix them. Check to see that your text makes sense and if it doesn't then fix it.

Whatever you do, don't upload the site until it is complete and in it's final form. And remember, it isn't in its final form until you are sure that it is the best you can do with your current skill-level.

Mediocrity never sells anything so make sure that each site or gallery you prepare is the very best that you can produce. There's nothing magic formula involved in producing your best sites - it's just a matter of following these six simple steps.