Charles Lau dot Com

I often ask people around me if they have any intention to start a website. I realize they have a problem when thinking of starting a website. That is, they usually think of starting a website only when they are ready. But I have always told them that starting a website is not like starting a business and start making money immediately. It takes time to grow the website and thus it is always good to work on your website while you are working on your business or job.

Why start when you are not ready?
It’s actually because your website wouldn’t be ready so early. You will need time for your website to grow in terms of search engine rankings and for other websites to link to you… It takes quite a while and that you shouldn’t focus on building all your income based on your website yet unless you are going to invest in heavy advertisement to bring in the traffic as fast as you can…

Maturity in your website
Your website starts to mature along the way as you understand certain methods of attracting your visitors in a better way than others. You can do whatever you want with your website and yet nobody will comment on it. Nobody will know about it either. You can make all the mistakes you want with the website. You can do trial and error with your website. You can even tear down the whole website and re-do them all with nobody knowing about it…

Should I submit my site to search engines now or later?
I would recommend you to submit it as soon as you have started working on your website. That’s because it is not easy to attract traffic from the search engines until the search engines gave you some green light for it. Even if you have a well-done website after working on it for a few months, the search engines might not really believe what your website has to offer since there are so many other credible websites than yours. So while you have a website, simply submit it and keep refining your website while you see your website getting indexed in search engines’ database…

Should I start telling people about my website?
Only when you have a pretty complete website, then should you start marketing your website. If your website still contains a lot of “under construction” pages, I think you shouldn’t let anybody know about it just yet. Giving yourself some time to give a better impression for your visitors, is much better appreciated than to see a website which is not done up properly at all.

Have fun building your website from day one! Happy Boxing Day!