NEW YORK, NY – There are a lot of good courses and books out there that will teach you how to buy, sell and/or choose the right domain names to invest in, or how to choose names which have great resale value or those domain names which will stand the test of time, as far as valuation, but one of the greatest things a domain investor or enthusiast can learn is domain name development.
The ability to build your own domain name into a full-fledged website could very well be one of the most valuable things you could learn, and for the most part, you can do this all on your own with little to no help from anyone else.
The Internet has created a massive treasure-trove of information and there is a world of knowledge out there at your fingertips, just waiting to be scooped up simply by reading, trial and error.
There are also many forums out there and if you have a little patience you would be surprised how many good and very knowledgeable people are around who actually enjoy teaching others and will answer even the most complicated technical questions.
Just do a search for a coding question and you’re bound to find people who are willing to help out and most of the time it’s on some sort of forum or discussion board.
Here are three examples:
- https://www.google.com/search?q=php+include+footer
- https://www.google.com/search?q=Display+visitor+IP+Address
- https://www.google.com/search?q=Wordpress+if+post+in+category+do+this
Forums are fantastic places to learn the ins and outs of building websites and there are forums dedicated to just about everything; from SEO, design, programming, hosting, HTML, PHP, Java, you name it. There is a forum for anything you can imagine and often times there are members of these forums, potentially hundreds of them, who are just waiting to share their knowledge with anyone else on the forum that needs help.
The reason development is one of the best things you can possibly learn is because development and the actual management and ongoing improvements of your website are the most costly parts of the business.
If you can remove these cost of building and maintaining your websites over the long-term you’re going to be much better positioned for success and you’ll have the knowledge and ability to build your online businesses with very little start-up capital – and once they’re done, it’s not going to cost you an arm and leg to keep them running and continually improve them to stay competitive.
Another reason development is one of the best things you can possibly learn is because your domains will always be worth more money to you (and others) when they are developed. There are very few cases if any at all where your domains will have more value when they are parked, redirected or undeveloped.
Most people who build an online business and fail are probably those who are or were dependent on others to carry out some of the most fundamental aspects of the business, and when your business is online, that’s almost always directly related to either the website, or the management of the website. Many people will blame their failure on the web person or the designer or the developer, but maybe these people shouldn’t even have been involved in the first place.
No hired programmer or developer is ever going to work on your project as seriously and diligently as you are – period.
Plus, if your able to code things yourself and your able to understand what these people need to do, you’re going to be much better at measuring their success on the project or whether or not they really did a good job or if they completed the task as best as it could be done. When you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s difficult to instruct someone to get that same thing done, because you don’t understand what exactly is involved, if you had to do it yourself, so you wind up in a position of just taking someone’s word for it all the time; as a leader of a project, that’s not the best position to be in.
I’d compare it to having a foreman on a builder’s job. You’re going to want your foreman to know how to do all of the tasks as if he could do them himself, because then, and only then, will he better pick the right people for the jobs, and assign the right crews with the right skills. If you put an unskilled foreman on a job and he just took everyone’s word for everything, but he didn’t have any of his own experience, there are no good “gut” choices to be made, it’s just going to be a very rudimentary order following process, and the project, overall, will lack creativity and intuitiveness.
You’ll wind up with a very ordinary end result; nothing special.
Programmers and designers can be very expensive, and most of them lack vision, especially if they are outsourced or oversees resources. That’s why even the most talented of programmers often don’t have their own successful projects running; they just code stuff when they’re told to do it.
When you put entrepreneurial spirit, and creativity behind the ability to create, that’s when you get something special.
About The Author: John Colascione is Chief Executive of Internet Marketing Services Inc. He specializes in Website Monetization, authored a ‘how to’ book called ‘‘Mastering Your Website’, and is a key player in several Internet related businesses through his search engine strategy brand Searchen Networks®
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