OK, so this is not really about speaking, nor even precisely about writing prose. Rather, it's about being selective with words and thinking first before putting … finger to keyboard** when you're getting busy with making your own website (or anyone else's for that matter).

Following on from last week's overhaul of our online ad system, it seems timely to devote a few lines to talking about getting the most out of your ad campaign by writing appealing text.

The bottom line is: if you want someone to click your ads and visit your website, you've gotta think about the text you use. You'll need a catchy title, and 120 characters of killer text that makes people want to know more (and that they'll just have to click because it's too effective not to ...).

Did you ever wonder just what the big deal with e-commerce is? Let me help you. Try to imagine a business selling stuff that's been around for a long time (i.e. established products in an established market). Picked one? Good. Now picture that business experiencing double-digit sales growth - year in, year out – just because the owners of that business chose to make a website to sell their stuff online. By now, you should start to get an idea of why, even today, some people still tend to get a little excited at the mere mention of the word.

So I'll mention it, just for you: “e-commerce”. There, excited?

You choose what clothes to wear before you go out each day, right, just like you chose what colors to use to make your own website? Those choices, I'll wager, were dependent both on the the context and on who you are: different strokes for different folks, and your Sunday best for … whatever you figure is worth it. I've been putting mine on (Sunday best, that is) every morning this week, hoping it would attract Starey and Dearie out into the open. My plan half worked … once (it was Dearie, on Tuesday, for those interested, and yes, she seemed fine).

Now, it may startle you to know that most people's first attempts at “dressing to attract a wild animal's attention” … fail. Startled? I thought so. Indeed, as you might already suspect, there are more effective ways of getting attention.

Parents can be such a disappointment. Here I was, convinced my mother would become a key part of our marketing strategy: living proof that doomby makes it easy to make a website. “Don't believe me?” I'd say. “It's so easy, even my mother can make a website with doomby!”. I'm sure I even used that as the central pitch of my job interview, and is very probably the reason why I got hired: “buy one, get one free!”.  Several months later, I even went so far as to ask her if that was OK, and decided that I would respect her wishes (unless she said no).

Then she had to go and ruin everything by having “technical problems”.

She often does, so it shouldn't have surprised me. Like sometimes, she can't quite figure out how to switch things on. It was power sockets the last time I dropped by for a visit - that should have set the alarm bells off but no, I had to persist. “Growing pains,” I thought. “She'll learn”. When I got the phone call last week - “I went on the website, but I couldn't see where you wrote anything about me” - it started becoming all too clear. My mother was either consciously rebelling (a family trait, so highly likely) or slightly … technically challenged.

Either way, it was just so disappointing. I mean, you try to get them off to a good start by giving them the best years of your life, then this is how they treat you …

The focus of today's post is all about what to do before you even begin to make a website - we'll call that the thinking stuff. But it's also about what not to do (aka the doing stuff) when you make your own website: free or not, and no matter how many (or how few) people you think may see it.

But I'm preaching to the converted, right?

You already know what I'm talking about, I'm sure. When you go ahead and create a website, you'll never make the kind of errors showcased on one of my favorite sites ... or will you? Then again, can you imagine any webmaster - whose work will later feature prominently as an example of what not to do when building a website - thinking "hey, I know, I'll make a website that sucks!" when they start out?

So where did they go wrong, and how do you avoid making the same kind of mistakes?

For our Facebook fans, you'll be pleasantly surprised to know that you didn't have to wait “a few days” for an update: it's already here, and the waiting is over!

We've had a big week at doomby. Lots of new things have been going on, including the addition of some much-requested features to help you make a website even more quickly and easily.

Here's some of the more interesting new features we've added to the doomby free website builder:

The first real taste of autumn has finally hit, and has brought with it a refreshing improvement. Delays? What delays? 

After some intense scurrying and much hard work by a great team over the past week (yay team!), both the servers and the services are behaving much better.

Thanks everyone for your patience during the last few days, and have a great weekend.

P.S. Why not take advantage of the cooler weather to ... I don't know ... make a website, perhaps?

OK, so maybe the forceps left a slight mark after all, which you might just have noticed ...

Yes, we've been experiencing a few technical glitches and slower access times at certain periods of the day (plus the odd cry for help), but we're well on our way to getting things back to normal so you can get back to the business of website building. And who doesn't stumble at least once while they're growing up? If you think back to when you were a little younger, I'll wager you'll remember a scrape or two. I know I do, and, although my ET BMX is long since gone (I wonder what ever happened to that bike?), I still have the scars on my knee and shin to prove it.

If you're already wondering “what's a doomby?”, then you should probably read the first post, titled  “What's doomby, and how do I use it to make a website?”. To save you some time, the ultra condensed version of that post is: doomby's a free website builder, and you can use it to make a website (funnily enough). As in, make your own website, about stuff that interests you. For free.

So what, exactly, can you do with doomby, and how is it going to help you to create a website?

I thought about titling the first post of the doomby blog “Happy birthday”, or “In spite of the forceps, our head came our looking OK”. And either would have made an OK title, right?

Then I suddenly remembered that my illustrious boss (Bossman the younger) had asked me at some point in the (now somewhat distant) past to explain the choice of name now inscribed on this website's birth certificate. He might also have mentioned something about describing what doomby actually is, and how to use it to make a website, but my attention span is not dissimilar to that of a goldfish, so I had to be reminded about that (several times).

But back to “name choice” bit. As with any good story, there are two versions: the short one and the long one. To summarize the short one (and make it really short): it won the beauty and popularity tests, and was available. 10 words. 

Yep, that's short (and makes a lovely post-modern Haiku).