Running Your Own Website Isn’t Meant To Be A Form Of Torture

More people than ever are interested in running their own website these days. This is great news as it is a way of working which can be exciting as well as profitable. However, when I started my own website it was the most painful experience I had suffered since I bought a pair of shoes which were a size too small for me.

Thankfully I have learned a few things since then. As well as double and triple checking the size of my footwear before buying them I have also come across the following ways of running a site without any pain.

Get Someone Else to Do it
If a job is worth doing it is worth getting someone else to do it for you. At the start I tried to combine my full time job with the running of my new website. What I didn’t realize was all of the work which I would need to do in order to get a slick looking site which moved up the search engine rankings fairly rapidly. I started off well but after a week or two of 15 hour working days my body just wouldn’t cope anymore. I then discovered that it was cheap and easy to get some global freelancers to do a lot of the work for me. This meant that I could once again eat at the dinner table, watch some television and even go out occasionally. No matter how dedicated you are to the site’s success you simply can’t afford to let it take over your life completely in this way. If I am being honest the people I hired were better than me at most of the specific jobs I asked them to do anyway.

Image is licensed under CC Attribution

Avoid a Slow, Annoying Site
I am a bit of a cost cutter at times. This is great when it comes to finding bargains on out of fashion shirts and yoghurt which is almost but not quite out of date but it isn’t so advisable on your website. My first site set up was a bit of a disaster as it was cheap looking and it was so slow to load that the few visitors who stumbled on it probably gave up in frustration. In the end I moved to dedicated server hosting and this made it a fast and reliable site which I could be proud of. Actually, this is a good point, as it is important that you are as proud of your website as possible if you are going to be running it for a long time. This will help ensure that you do your very best to make a long term success of it. As well as dedicated server hosting you could also look at getting a good website designer to make it look really good and impress your visitors even more.

Relax and Forget About It
I spent the first few months after starting my online business worried about every single statistic concerning it. I must have checked in on it about a thousand times a day and it probably become a bit of an obsession. This isn’t a very healthy way to run your business and at some point you will need to relax and forget about your website for a while. I found that things went a lot better when I switched off the computer for a few hours and did something different like read a book or go for a walk. It can be hard to forget about your online business at first but if you want to keep your sanity then it is something you need to get used to.

Jann Webb is an online writer who uses dedicated server hosting to prevent her writing business from becoming a form of torture.