I wanna learn. Especially from all you good ol'e boys
 

Ok kids.

We all know what I do... I do SEM and have never owned anything myself. All my experience is in managing already existing sites.

I'm sort of thinking about trying my hand at a paysite now. This has just come up when I was talking about it with a few people that want to start producing content.

So since I have NO experience whatsoever in starting a website... I have a few questions I hope some of you can answer.

1) Who does good design work and where can I find it cheap.

2) Content management... I need something that will let me control the look and feel of the website, and also allow me to update it easily. (I suck at programming)

3) hosting, what's good... what isn't... how much bandwidth do i need for a new site?

4) Billing.... CCbill? or another like that? or get my own merchant account?

any other tips would be greatly appreciated.

is there anything i'm reall missing? stuff i should be thinking about when doing this the first time?

Re: I wanna learn. Especially from all you good ol'e boys
 

Mate , you are mnissing the single most important thing you need before having a paysite.

Traffic.

The traffic I can get no problems.... that's the one thing i'm good at.... its everything else that I need to learn

also the toughest!

What is SEM?

Search Engine Marketing

Then trust me you do not want your own paysite group and the bollocks that entails just yet.

Concentrate on what ou are good at , if it is SE then get 100s of domains targeted and well listed to various niches.

When you are sending out 50-100 sales a day from your own dfomains to affil proggies it might be time to build some paysite front ends and send to your own.

Until you reach this level merely continue to build feeder sites.

Start with a core site that leaks out to all sorts of free sites, fake TGPs, MGPs, galleries, etc that you also own.
Interlink everything.

Yup , read Colin's thing on building an empire...still holds true

Paysites are a pain in the arse - period, I won't touch that animal again because of all the hoops you have to jump through... listen to Nick and Chris...

Yeah thanks guys. We'll see what happens. It came up the other day when a few people said they wanted to start as a partership with me... the girls wanted to do their own content and get something started

I hadn't really thought about it before and thought I'd get some ideas and suggestions before I made a decision

Re: I wanna learn. Especially from all you good ol'e boys
 

http://www.bluewirestudio.com/hiband/ do great work and will bend over backwards to accomodate what you need. Very cool guys indeed. There are others out there and plenty to avoid like the proverbial plague. You could always start a thread and invite portfolios from designers?

Re: Re: I wanna learn. Especially from all you good ol'e boys
 

Bluewirestudio are top designers, they do great work and as Newton has said they go above and beyond to make you happy. I'd recommend them any day. :)

Re: Re: I wanna learn. Especially from all you good ol'e boys
 

You love them you do.

Very nice designs. But a tad expensive for mainstream.

Let's put it another way. A brick-and-mortar store with a high budget, yep, they're in line. If someone just did mainstream online and wanted to put up dozens of different sites, then ouch. I'd buy a template.

Depends on the site ROI. That said, yes, outstanding work. Can't fault the design at all.