As I have said before on more than one occasion, I have spent a lot of the last  20 years or so setting up/designing/maintaining and being involved in a series of online projects themed around my boarding school and the young gentlemen, such as myself, who went there. A labour of love it may have been but a labour it was nonetheless. I don’t regret any of it but as some of you reading this may know, setting up things for others to use or enjoy online can be an empty business.

Inspiration & The Reality Gap

Pondering...

Firstly, you can’t do it quickly. You many have a brilliant idea, one you may visualize with crystal clarity in your head but if you ask any sort of creative person – say an author (ahem) – they will all agree that at this stage, you project is approximately 2% complete. This is often completely at odds with your own perceptions but I would have to throw my hat into the ring and agree with them. Many is the time I have been sitting at work or driving home in the car, when an absolute corker of an idea has filled my head, just above the nose. At this point, shamefully, my gas pedal hits the floor and speedbumps become a thing of skant concern. By the time I reach the end of my gravel driveway, bound up the front steps and allow my manservant to welcome me into the foyer of the family pile, the fire of inspiration is still burning fiercely. Hives removes my coat, the cat drops my slippers at my feet and I power up the PC. The harsh white glow of the screen then slaps some sense into me and most of the enthusiasm  fades like…well, like a sentence without an end.

For a lot of the time, that’s exactly what happens. During the year long gap in which I didn’t blog, that happened about 3 times a week. Now and again, it still happens. You just have to live with it. Now that the blog is up and running again, all I have to do is type and as you will have hopefully have seen, I manage it much more often. Thanks to Evernote, I don’t tend to drive home like a lunatic anymore either. If anyone ever solves the problems or fat fingers and a small touch screem, it will indeed be a perfect world.

If it ever becomes possible to forget that GTA Vice City and it’s tempting streets exist, then that will also be of great help to me.

I’ve drifted again haven’t I?

Well, what I am trying to say is that the first hurdle to creating online wonderment is that its a f**k of a lot of work, even to do it slightly well. To do it very well, you have to be 9 people or 1 genius.  I fit into neither camp. I take my time, get frustrated, Google a lot and copy other people. Don’t look so shocked. I suspect I am not alone.

The one hurdle I sometimes find it hardest to get over, is that some things are beyond me. This usually presents itself when I have spent an afternoon looking for inspiration. Common places for this are…actually going to stay secret, suffice to say there are sights and technical achievements to boggle the mind. Now, I can use Photoshop but its a huge oil-burning pig of a program. The manual for version 5 (the last one I read) might as well have been written in Latin. What the online help file for Photoshop CS5 must be like, I can only imagine. I usually use Fireworks to create my graphics, but even that is largely a closed book to me. I  do what I can and mostly what I need to do. It’s partly why I have never done this sort of thing professionally. I couldn’t stand the idea of being asked to do something I didn’t know how to do. Also, I use about 10% of Dreamweaver when coding HTML. I suspect I am not alone in this either.

Finally, you have to keep it alive. I know this to my cost and you ignore this key ingredient in your online project at your peril. It’s hard to be specific about anything other than my own stuff, but take this blog entry for example; once posted and I have Tweeted a notice of it’s newness to about 100 followers and put it on my Facebook page for 400 friends to see, I will get about 20 hits. Tomorrow, when people get to work, I’ll get about the same amount again. This week, I might make 100 hits. This is unique visitors and doesn’t include return visits. If I make no post next week, I might get another 10 hits and after that, maybe 5 a week until I post again. I can promise you one thing. No one is looking to advertise on my site. Unless you have invented iPlayer or iTunes (I think I see a pattern), a lot of people are not going to give a monkeys about what you have done. You could be really, really lucky like me and have a target audience, some of you whom like what you have done but mostly, you will be ignored. It’s a tough lesson, but all the hit counters and spinning visitor globes will not bring people to your site in droves.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. I once mentioned Gillian Anderson, Clint Eastwood and Pamela Anderson in a blog post (as a test) and got almost 300 hits in a week. This sort of experiment is frowned upon and the Google bots will soon find you out, so don’t try it (unless you are blogging about famous celebrities of the 80s or course). Quite what would happen if I mention Justin Bieber, Dancing On Ice, Lindsey Lohan or Red Nose Day,  I can only imagine. Oops.

The one thing I find hard to babble on about is…well, babbling on. You have to be able to write a bit; I can – write a bit that is – but I don’t do it very well, not on paper or screen at least. Most of us know what to say but either because we haven’t done very much of it since the age of 15 or perhaps because we never could in the first place, we can’t put into words. This is not a huge worry but it’s something you should be aware of. Most of your readers’ brains will work out what you want to say and very few will feel the need to tell you where you have gone wrong. In any case, you will be understood.

So, after struggle, torment, plagerism, manual reading, googing, relaxing, typing, patience, calmness, panic, frustration, desperation, defining your own creative limitation and often going for walk to clear you head, you are done.

Shouting At The World

There's only one really...

In a word, don’t bother. I pondered for a while before writing this paragraph and while the first sentence seems a little harsh, it rings true. Perhaps it didn’t 15 years ago when there were dozens of search engines, all eager for your content. Now there is just Google and to a lesser extent, Bing. Google is really the only one that matters and it’s bots will eventually index your online world and show it to the world. Well, they will show it to the world if they enter the right search terms. If they don’t, you webby work might as well be in a bin bag in the shed. Again, harsh but true.

But remember, you have friends – both Facebook and real, tell them and tell everyone on Twitter. That process alone will grab the attention of those who know and love you and who are eager to click a link whilst slurping the Kenco.

Of course, as I said before, I am lucky. My stuff was and is for a largely captive, ready made audience of old school friends. They are brilliant, receptive and sometimes embarrassingly grateful. I feel guilty sometimes because I get frustrated when they don’t use my site exactly the way I intended or because I wish they would contribute more but a swift kick up my own backside soon rids me of this. This swift kick is usually in the form of someone I haven’t spoken to in 20 years suddenly popping up or like this week when a well respected author of online content and the printed page finds the time to join my new forum and enters into a short correspondence.

So, don’t bother shouting. Do it because you want to and because a few other people might like to see what you do. Don’t worry if you don’t work on it for a while and don’t worry that your audience is getting frustrated or thinking less of you for not spending your Sunday afternoon banging away at your PC keyboard. They will still love you when you do come back, no matter how long that is. Go for a walk, go to Vice City or go and sit on someone else’s sofa watching X-Factor, eating chocolate muffins and trying to convince them they will be a great mother.

The more you do, the more you will have to think about and write about and the more likely you will be able to spend an hour typing 1600 words about yourself to no one in particular.

A bit like I have just done.

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