My Journey
from Technophobe to Website Builder!

Since I put up my website and have got such positive feedback from people about it, one of the most common questions I am asked is, 'How did you do it?'

I have found that my experience of going on the net is becoming increasingly relevant to many of my readers because of the worsening global economy----people are casting around for ways to weather the recession by building their own internet home-businesses, as a second income, to replace lost jobs, or to allow new mothers stay at home with their babies and still be able to earn some money. For all of you who may be in such a situation, here is how I did it....

(For the practical nuts 'n' bolts of how I did it, please scroll further down the page to the next headline.)

But first, I thought some of you might like to hear the story of how it came about...

Like many good things in life, I became an internet publisher by accident, as a result of a setback which, looking back was a great opportunity, but at the time, felt pretty awful---an "opportunity" in the Chinese sense of the word, a crisis in any other language!

A TV project of mine which I had spent a lot of time and energy putting together fell apart at the last hurdle. The backers wanted to dumb down the concept and turn an investigative documentary series about the global food industry into a lifestyle-reality show. That was pretty easy to walk away from, but I was left burnt-out, broke and devoid of the enthusiasm for ever working on anything else again which would involve having to convince money moguls and TV execs that my proposals for challenging, analytical documentaries and intelligent salon type chat shows were worth backing.

This was the second axing I had suffered recently. My previous project had been three years "in development" and fell apart weeks before the shoot was due to begin. Yet every cheap, tacky, loud, gimmicky proposal seemed to get commissioned.

Is there a place for me anymore in this shiny happy TV land? I asked myself, indulging in a pre-midlife existential crisis, looking at the heap of book manuscripts, film treatments and TV pitches that I was working on, but which needed me to have the energy to keep on trying to convince other people to pay money to make.

My sister, who breezes in and out of my life with total inconsistency, arrived back into my life in the middle of my pre-midlife crisis, with her version of a solution. Instead of a bottle of wine and some nice bath oils, she had brought me a present of an SBI website package from the SiteSell company, apparently "to cheer me up"!

What the ****, I replied.

(Yes, around this time in my life, I was using a lot of expletives!)

As if things weren't bad enough you want to land me with having to build two websites!

(It was one of Sitesell's two-for-one-bargains.)

Are you completely crazy? You know I HATE technology! Especially information technology!

(At that point I could just about word-process, email and surf, and that was after years of resisting getting a computer!)

Honey, it's not technology, IT'S AUTONOMY STUPID!!!! she replied, with her customary certainty that she is 100% right about everything that concerns MY life!

Now, that got me. Autonomy is something I like. It's one of my 'good words'. I had been trying to achieve artistic autonomy over my work for a long time! She knew what button to press when she chose that particular word to fire at me.

Autonomy. Hmm? How so? I replied, feigning disinterest.

FREEDOM! she declared. On the internet there are no mediators---you can get your work direct to your readers. Turn one of your book projects into a website. And that TV series about food those ******** turned down--- make it a website! And that public art concept you've been talking about---you don't need to wait to get anyone else's permission, or funding. Just give it its own website and put it live online! Then, when you've learned the ropes, you can start your own blasted TV station online if you want to and make your programs how you want to make them! The internet's the perfect solution for STUBBORN UNCOMPROMISING PEOPLE LIKE YOU!!!!

Instead of whacking her, the lightbulb in my stubborn, uncompromising head switched on. Her words made absolute sense to me. We both laughed. Why hadn't I thought of this before? I asked. The internet was the perfect medium for several of my works-in-progress.

So, long story short, to kick off my new autonomous venture, I decided to build my first site about the importance of natural food and how the loss of shared meals and home-cooking had deep resonances for society.

The public art project I am curating is underway and I will keep you informed when I am ready to launch it. I am also developing a third website about green issues that are close to my heart.

How I built my site

In fact, in my own mind, I had decided that I wouldn't even need to learn anything more about internet technology than I already new, which was nothing! HTML? I'd never heard of it. (When I bought my first computer, I famously asked the shop assistant if I would need a monitor for a computer! And when I got the computer home and plugged it in, I had to ring the shop to ask them how to turn it on!)

After that my nine-year old daughter took matters in hand and taught me the basics she had learned at school, and before I knew it I could surf and email. Wow! But my tuition stopped there, because my teacher had not been given further training, and my computer education remained tragically stunted.

That was the state of affairs when the gift was offered to me by my sister. But did she stick around to help me build my websites? No! She went off and had a baby and an extended babymoon of over a year when she was unavailable to mother me through my infancy as a clueless website-builder!

Apart from the odd intervention here and there, she abandoned me to my SBI website package and its blockbuilder system, which must have been designed for idiots like me, because despite her absence, I managed to stumble through and teach myself, using Sitesell's infinite resource materials, everything I needed to know about building a successful website. Not just a lonely brochure website that no one ever visited, like many of my business friends had and had paid thousands to fancy web designers for. No. The Sister had hit on something that was just right for me---this package included everything else I needed to know, have and do, to build a site that worked.

(If you like, you can take a peep here at the exact step by step process I followed in the SBI video guide )

Things that had never occured to me before, like how to build traffic, exchange links, pick the right keywords, win at the search engines, even how to monetize a site---it was all part of the package. Things I didn't know I needed to learn, were part of the program of website development that came along with the SBI package.

Suddenly I had access to what seemed like infinite resources of knowledge, through the Sitesell forums, articles, free downloads and the state-of-the art internet savviness of Dr. Ken Evoy, Sitesell's innovative founder, who is one of the world's experts on how to be successsful on the net.

Ken likes to stay at the cutting edge of what's going on in cyberspace. And because he does, I get to do it too, without any effort! Every Friday, I get Dr Evoy's prized SBI Express e-zine in my mailbox, which tells me everything I need to know and do to be a successful web prescence and keep my site up to date with the fast-changing world of the internet. Using SBI has been like signing up at a website university, where I can pick and choose modules as I need to learn them, and somewhere within this huge library of information, I can find whatever piece of know-how I am looking for at any particular time. See my mini-version of a website university here.

Along with my easy website page-builder, The Sister, without knowing it, had bought me the expertise of Ken Evoy, one of the internet's best brains. Knowing what I know now about the internet, I feel very lucky that she chose this web package and not one of the myriad of others she could have got, because without the ongoing self-education I have had access to with Sitesell, I couldn't have succeeded.

Moreover, my SBI web package enabled me to build a site that I could control myself, without having to go back again and again to some expensive Techie Guy, each time I needed to make some alteration, or build a new page.

That word AUTONOMY kept coming back to me as I realised the value of the Sister's gift. I began to see more and more possibilities for putting my content on the internet that I hadn't dreamed of before and I could see a way of building my writing and other creative projects into a livelihood that I was in charge of. FREEDOM.

In fact, once each web project is built, it will leverage my time in a way I have never succeeded in doing before, allowing me to develop parallel TV programs about the all same issues that I care about, but without the pressure of needing them to get made quickly, so that I can pay my mortgage!

Finally, I can work on my own terms and still have enough personal resources to develop other projects that are close to my heart. When my sister bought me that SBI package, she opened up my entire life to new possibilities. Now, with the change in the global economy, I am so thankful she did, because I am not dependent on other people's whims anymore, or on employment that I could lose any minute. While my TV colleagues are losing jobs and folding their production companies, I am my own boss, building my own destiny as I build my websites. And I never have to compromise on my content to get it past a commissioning editor, because I'm the commissioning editor (and if that sounds a bit control-freaky, you've no idea of the hell that pitch meetings can be!)

So, I am glad to say this story ends happily ever after---my Sister's little baby is approaching his first birthday on planet earth. Like him, I too have survived to celebrate my first year, in planet cyberspace. And she is now back to manage and develop my sites, leaving me free to do what I love best---liasing with my readers and writing more content, as well as launching my new sites and other creative internet projects...more about those anon! Now, at a time when possibilities seem to be contracting for many people, I am grateful that possibilities that never existed before for me, are opening up. The internet's my oyster!

I would like to thank Dr. Ken Evoy of Sitesell, for creating such a wonderful, empowering product in SBI. I would like to thank my sister for seeing exactly what I needed at a critical point in my life. And I would like to thank my readers, who seem to "get" my website and understand what I am on about!

My growing readership has given me an Alexa ranking which places me in the top 1% of all websites in the world, which is extremely gratifying, considering how young my site is, how inexperienced I am on the net and the fact that I have not had to spend a single cent advertising or promoting my site. You found me anyway! Thank you, especially all of you who wrote me such nice, encouraging emails to tell me you like the site. That is what makes it so worthwhile.

Currently, with the bleak winds of recession and redundancy blowing though many lives, I would thoroughly recommend the web package I used to people who are looking for a way to build a second stream of income, to turn their passion into a business, or to parents who long to stay at home with young children and be able to work from home in their own time. The internet was a beacon of hope for me at a difficult time and I hope it could provide the same empowering opportunity for others to turn a crisis into something good.

I have built a page with some more information and free resources for anyone who would like to learn more about building a website and launching an internet career or business. A mini-website university! Website Building School---Free Resources for Aspiring Website Owners. If you would like to send a question about SBI to Ken Evoy, you are welcome to do so.

If you are considering buying a website package, I recommend you go to some of the pages below to find out a little more about this product before you buy.

• Sitesells homepage
  
• How SBI helps build a successful website.
  
• How you can achieve independence and freedom beginning with one little website.

Read about how internet-businesses are ideal for WAHMs

Read about Dr Ken Evoy, founder of SiteSell

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