About

You’re probably here because you are designing, building, managing or promoting your own website or blog. So, you either are, or soon will be, a webmaster or website owner. If you are starting a new website or blog, you’ve made a wise decision! We all know every business, sole trader and entrepreneur should have their own website or blog, but what if you are employed or don’t run your own business?

You should still have your own site, perhaps a blog. As Gary Vaynerchuk, entrepreneur and hugely successful video blogger, says in his popular book crush it, now is the time to cash in on your passion. The barriers to entry in building your own website are lower than they have ever been. There are an amazing array of platforms, tools, software, skills, advice and knowledgable professionals, and you can find them all on the internet.

Many of these tools are free, like wordpress, which is an outstanding software platform and powers this blog. But where do you start? The information available and knowledge required to build and manage a professional looking site with great content has exploded. If you want to do-it-yourself there are so many skills you need to know it’ll make your head spin.

Rich Schefren, another successful entrepreneur I admire, gives the unsuspecting webmaster a taste of all the activities you need to be doing to build a successful business in his internet manifesto. It’s a good read and his newsletter regularly contains excellent advice too. As well as finding the time to do all these things, how do you write great content, salesletters or press releases, find a reliable web host provider, make podcasts or videos, publish a newsletter, build an subscriber list, code html or css, build a webstore, make a facebook page, optimise your site for the search engines, use google adwords, design a logo, build a popular blog, and the list goes on. Webdesignability is all about helping you to discover and learn how to do all this and more.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on all these topics, but as you will see if you read about me you’ll find I have more than enough knowledge and experience to help you find what you need to know and learn. Oh, and I’m a decent writer, which is unusual for people with my background. The benefit to you is an enjoyable read while you discover and learn.

About webdesignability and Terry Dunn

Webdesignability provides regular articles, or guides might be a better description, on what you need to learn, understand and master, for any topic a webmaster needs to run a successful website or blog. With more than 350 articles, videos and podcasts, you should be able to find what you’re looking for. And if you don’t, suggest it as an article topic, and I’ll research it and write it.

If you want to know more about me, I am a webmaster, writer, engineer and publisher. That’s me relaxing in the photo. I’ve worked as an IT professional for more than 15 years. You can connect with me on twitter,  facebook or linkedin. Just send me a friend request. If you read my blog, you’re a friend!

I’ve also been designing, building and publishing websites for many years. And during that time, the web has grown up. It’s morphed from a collection of static, brochureware sites into dynamic, websites and blogs. Today, the web is dominated by social networking and as a webmaster knowing how to use social media to build your brand is essential. Start by reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s book crush it.

Here are few comments from some of our readers,

Well written article. I appreciate your writing skills. Its great. You have done a great job by sharing this article with us. I like this post. Keep sharing with us.

Hey, I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say GREAT blog!…..I”ll be checking in on a regularly now….Keep up the good work!

Wow, this post is chock full of useful links. I will have to refer to this later today and check some of this stuff out! Thanks for sharing!

So, will you join me and become a regular reader? All you need to do is subscribe to the webdesignability feed. Do it now before you forget. Improving your skills is a continuous process and probably the best investment in yourself you can make. You will discover the benefits are many times greater than the effort.  How do you subscribe? Click on the orange feed button at the top right of this page that says get regular articles, and as soon as I publish a new article, you will instantly receive it in your favourite RSS feed reader.

If you don’t already have an RSS reader, I can recommend google reader and feedly to organise your feeds. They are both easy to use, uncluttered, always available, quick to load and reasonably intuitive to learn. Google reader, like most google applications, is free. I’m also a fan of google chrome. Despite increasing competition from firefox and IE, I still find chrome faster and more stable.

Even if they employ web professionals or outsource workers to manage their websites, the smartest webmasters know they still need to know and understand the process of designing, building and promoting websites and blogs. Look upon it as quality control. You’ll know exactly what’s needed. This means a good experience for your visitors. And that means they’ll be back.

This is the secret ingredient to building a community around your web business.