...setting up a website. Since I am a techie, and find this bit of the internet fairly straightforward, I am going to keep a diary of what and how well I do, on both the technical and traffic front.

Hopefully as I go through this process, I will help some of you improve your understanding of what needs to be to set up a website and how this is achieved, and your feedback and comments will help me improve what I do and how I do it.

Because I am writing about the complete process, I will if people are interested in any particular aspect, spin off new hubs. If you want to know about ftp, sitemaps etc, just leave a note and I will see if we can make things easier by example.

Research.

I am fairly fortunate having done a number of hub pages and ezine articles in that I know of a subject 'domain' that will allow me to add content that will attract traffic. That domain relates to keeping chickens and catching rabbits, both of which have attracted more attention than teaching a dog to sit. In the current economic climate, we can make a connection between the two of home food production, and coping with feeding a family on a budget.

So by extending this connection to include a number of food related subjects, including gardening, bee-keeping, 'wild' food and food preparation, we have a whole series of niche markets.

I have decided to call this site 'better-food-on-a-budget'. I use the hyphens in the name so that the search engines can extract the words more easily from the site name. If I was going to advertise on the radio or tv, I would also get a site 'betterfoodonabudget'. This would avoid the need to spell out the hyphens.

Now it is 22:33 on a Monday night, I am going to go and see if the site name is available.

I am back at 22:38. In the meantime I have logged onto my business account with 1and1.co.uk, which is the web host company I use. I have checked for the availability of the site, and applied for it. It should be available in twelve hours or so.

I pay about £10 a month for the use of the web host, and dare say I could do better. If times get tougher for me I will seek out a better offer, but for the moment it is easier to stay where I am.

 I have gone back to the 1and1 control panel and set up a directory where I want to store the pages that I write. I have called this directory bfoab, so that I have a mnemonic to remind me what sites are stored where. 1and1 say it will be available in three hours, but like the twelve hours for the domain name I suspect it will be much quicker.

Since I am a programmer, and think I can do better than microsoft, I have written a content management program (still a work in progress, but quite useful so far), rather than use the first program that I used to create a website, which was microsoft frontpage. This is not to say frontpage and similar tools are not good, they are, but I wanted something I could tailor to my wants and needs.

If you are using frontpage I suggest that you create a page called index.htm and load it up into your directory.

I have written a couple of pages in my content management system, and will attempt to load them up now (22:52).

23:00 and I have uploaded my site content to the directory I set up earlier. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is used to load site content from the laptop I am working on to the internet.

Hubpages and wordpress do not use this sort of program, because their content management is based on the internet. The approach I am taking allows me to test a site quickly on the laptop rather than spend time on the internet. It lets me check out whatever I want in a controlled way, rather than finding that the site is not how I want it after I have loaded it up.

I have typed in the url www.better-food-on-a-budget.com and found that it is being reported as a broken link by google. Guess that it is still too early to get the domain up - 23:08.

Because the use of Amazon and Google ads is incorporated in the software I am using, I have switched it off for the time being. There is not enough content for Google's advertisers to benefit from the site, so for the time being I have decided to leave it off.

This has some benefits before you register it in the directories as well - these listings prefer the sites to be content rich rather than showing too much advertising, so the ability to switch advertising on and off at the site level (rather than the page level) is very useful. It is now 23:12.

And am ready for bed... getting up at 5:45 tomorrow. :-(

The site is now in place, although it is not up on the DNS (think that stands for Domain Name Servers, but is where your browser searches for any www.name.tld that you key in).

The plan is tomorrow night I will start to register it with Google, by uploading the sitemap (an index of all the pages) to Google. After that I will add some more content, aiming at a page a day for a month or two, then begin to register it with the directories and trying to get backlinks.

Right, it is 23:25 and I have just refreshed the site - hey presto it is there already! That does not mean it is available right across the net, just that it is rolling out to the various Domain Name Servers so that more and more people will be able to find it. So if you want to try a cake recipe my wife has recently discovered, try visiting the site.

One thing that you may find interesting, is the sitemap that has been generated for the site. This can be submitted to Yahoo or Google, and will ensure that they are aware of every page in the site. It allows you to specify some useful information, such as how often they should visit the site, and how important each page in the site is. This importance is a number between 0 and 1, and I am using it to make pages deep in the site more important than those high on the site. This is to allow me to create a pyramid of information, with very high level detail on the home page, gradually getting more and more specific as you drill down through the site. This is very search engine friendly. This sitemap can be seen at http://www.better-food-on-a-budget.com/sitemap.xml

If anyone has any specific questions on what I have said, or views on whether this is going to be of interest to anyone, let me know? Don't want to be boring...

Finally signing off at 23:52 - would have been 23:45 but I lost internet connection and could not save or publish this...

I have added the site to my Google publishers page - it is 7:20 on the following morning. I need to verify ownership of the site before they will do anything, and this is done by adding a small file with a name they supply to the directory where the site is on the internet.

Okay, 7:25 and I have created a small empty file, using notepad and saving as googlecbf0ac28c7af769a.html (with the file type set to all files). This has been uploaded (using the FTP program) to the site and the verify link on google has been pressed.

I have also added the sitemap to google, by going into webmasters tools and typing the name. This is now 'pending' which means that the search engine has not yet uploaded it, which normally takes a few minutes but can take a few hours. Once it is uploaded, it will be checked to ensure it is in the correct format, and (some of) the pages will be read by the google spider in the next couple of weeks. 7:32 and I need to leave for work, late already!

I just checked Google for the status of the sitemap, and it reported errors. Trying not to panic, I clicked on details and could set nothing wrong with the four URLs (Universal Resource Locators, or the www.domain-name.com/pagename bits to you or I) that it claimed was invalid.

When I checked on the internet, I could see the pages. Confusing. However, when I checked for about the fourth time, I noticed I did not have the hyphens in the domain name. These are difficult problems to spot sometimes, and a fresh eye sometimes helps. So back to the software, edit the site URL, regenerate the site and reload it using the FTP program. Resubmit the sitemap in Google webmaster tools, and Bob's your uncle! Hopefully! 7:52.

Let's not get too excited though - it is still complaining and reporting errors. I really have to leave for work now... :-(

and I've spent ten minutes sorting out the invalid URL problem - it was a missing "HTTP://" in front of the URL. Have resubmitted the sitemap, and just had Google confirm that four URLs have been found and that they are okay. Will change the software to ensure it is added automatically in future.

Darling daughter and I have spent three hours building two rabbit traps. Have placed them in the field behind the house, suitably baited with carrots. Hope the sheep don't raid them, and hope that the farmer does not give us a hard time about how ridiculous they look. He is happy enough if we catch rabbits, but the traps do look very Heath Robinson and I suspect our street cred will suffer if they do not work. They will form a page or two of the new site if they work.

In the meantime, I will give content structure some more consideration and start building the site. As I add a couple of pages, I will load them up, along with the new sitemap. Google will pick up the new sitemap on a regular basis, and index those it takes a liking to. It is too early to look for backlinks, as the site is not very impressive on the content front, so for the next couple of weeks I will concentrate on writing and uploading the pages. Will then start using Google Analytics to track visitors.