I knew building a website couldn’t be that hard, I can use bookmarks to skip around a document and had made a couple of word documents link together. Surely a website is just an extension of this...

It is - only, it was nowhere near as easy as I thought (or hoped) it would be. I kissed a lot of frogs along the way and learnt some hard lessons.

My own naivety, frustration and silly mistakes were overcome with a determination and drive that I rarely produce. Given the journey I have been on, the time that I have committed and lessons I have picked up along the way – surely I have something I can pass on to others so they may bypass the errors I made and produce a fantastic website – for free.

In writing this 'blog' I am not proclaiming to be an expert on website development, rather a highly enthusiastic amateur who set himself the goal of building and publishing a website capable of generating more money than it cost to run² – and did it!

My story

For a long time now a friend and I have talked about how we might build a business that provides us wealth beyond our day to day jobs. We have seen the success of other, including friends, who have found a niche, given it a go and made it. It is fair to say we have witnessed tried and failed also… My friend runs a successful design company and I manage a commercial construction company.

Around six months ago I came up with an idea, pitched it to him and immediately he was on board. In very loose terms, the idea is to develop an online property management business with revenue derived from advertising, memberships and referrals. There are a myriad of Property Management companies operating on line, our idea is focused on a specific segment of this industry and has some very unique points of differentiation – I have spent hours crawling the web and am yet to find something comparable.

From my business experience, writing a “business plan” was pretty straight forward. Ideas came easily and we debated whether they were part of our core (soon to be) business. Now we knew everything we wanted from this business, all we had to do was hire a computer boffin to build the site, launch it and watch the cash roll in...

Problem number one – what did we actually want the boffin to do for us? Build a website? What does it look like? How does it work? How do we manage data? How do you place ads? A myriad of questions hit us head on just as we both entered into very busy times in our day jobs.

I decided I needed to start with a small project to learn as much as I could regarding the labyrinth that is the internet. I needed to prove to myself that I could build and publish a site, and more importantly make a dollar. But what did I have to offer?

After much sole searching, I decided I pretty much had nothing. Next option, what could I leverage off and the idea of freependium.com was born. If I could provide a service that directs people to the best free software, online tools and applications on the web, I could potentially market low cost paid services that provide avoid some of the compromise you get with free – whether it is limited access to functionality, less sophisticated tools or capacity (file size / number of projects).

With no idea of what web authoring software is, I noticed that Microsoft word had a save as a web page option. I added some content, saved the page and opened it with my browser – it worked!

To keep a long story short, over the next two months, much of my spare time was taken up with working out how to set up a template, which file types worked (and which didn’t), how to link pages, how to link within pages and finding content. It is fair to say at this point – it all became a little obsessive.

I found a great free web host 000Webhost.com and published my site – awesome, I could smell the money! Next step to financial freedom was to apply for a Google account, add the code and hey presto. After two days I received a response to my application which they had accidentally marked “declined”. Surely not?

I reviewed my site, considering the kind suggestions and resubmitted. Again, a declined was returned. You must be kidding me! At this point I decided I would try something completely new to me and ask a forum for help. Having put my masterpiece up for public scrutiny, I was provided some very polite feedback that suggested word is not a great platform for building websites, my text and images were all mixed up and the search engines wouldn’t be able to differentiate one from the other.

The recommendation that came with this review was to start again using a free web authoring tool named Kompozer.

And so begins version 2.0…

1.    I paid for my domain name and owned it before I decided I wanted this entire project to be completed for free. It can be done, however as I will explain through proceeding blogs, there can be compromise. What can you live with is the question that will determine how much you end up paying – or more importantly how much you don’t pay.

2.    I can put my hand on my heart and state that I generated more commission than the cost of the domain name before the site (version two) was launched. However, there is a twist to this which I will save for the appropriate blog.