This is a two part post due to its length.  Part 1 provides some background information on why I initially decided to build our company website and some of the challenges I encountered during the process.  Part 2 lists some personal observations along with some of the things I've learned in the past year as I built the website.

Before any webmasters, experts and other knowledgeable folks review my site (http://www.sunlandhi.com) and start pointing out all the defects, the poor to really bad choices I made and just plain wrong stuff in the site, let me state for the record that I am a Certified Professional Home Inspector and only a struggling, amateur webguy.

I have no pretense of thinking my website is technically sound.  However, for a Certified Professional Home Inspector and a guy that knew nothing about website design yada, yada, yada, and learned most of what I know by reading a newsletter coupled with trial-and-error programming, the website seems to be working and functioning adequately.

The items that currently need fixed or changed I mainly attribute to the fact that either SitePro News hasn't published that article yet, therefore I haven't read it and likely don't even know it exists or Al Guevara hasn't suggested that I change it.  I will explain both of these shortly.

Could the website look and work better?  Heck yes!  Would I like it to?  Heck yes!  I will gladly accept any help and advice any of you might care to offer but, sorry, I still don't have extra money to pay you.  If it helps in any way, I really would appreciate your help though.

The website project started in the spring of 2005 although the site did not go live until September 2005 due to some State of Arizona red tape.  I initially worked on conceptualizing what I perceived a website should consist of as well as trying to understand some of the do's and don'ts of web design.  Since I was using FrontPage, at least I didn't need to learn HTML and CSS code, yet.  I was intrigued and profoundly confused in trying to understand the concept of website optimization and how it works as well as how it doesn't work.  I provide my personal observations regarding website optimization and SEO in Part 2.

The decision for me to build the website became reality on a sunny Arizona summer afternoon when I said something to the effect: "Sorry, but I am not giving you $$ to build our website.  I will do it myself."  I then went online, did some searching, subscribed to a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Newsletter and started reading and reading and..., well, I still read a lot.

I owe a special "Thank You" to SitePro News (http://www.sitepronews.com/) for their help in building our website.  SitePro News is the primary SEO newsletter that I have read and followed over the last year.  In fact, many site revisions came shortly after a new issue of the newsletter arrived and reflected whatever topic it discussed.  SitePro News steered me pretty well most of the time and the few exceptions I did encounter were mostly me implementing what I thought they said as opposed to what they actually said.  So again, "Thank You SitePro News".

When I decided to build our website it was due to budgetary constraints coupled with my desire to be able to manage and make changes as required.  We also needed those funds for inspection tools, professional fees, business cards, brochures, etc.  We simply didn't have the money to hire someone to build it for us yet we both viewed it as an integral and needed business tool.

I started this project without any web whatever training and no experience with anything to do with website design, development, HTML, CSS or anything else to do with a website.  Nada, nothing, zilch.  I felt the two things I had going for me were my reading skills and my outright stubborness and stick-to-itiveness.  I said I would build a usable website and I was going to do just that.  I couldn't find a good reason why I wouldn't succeed.

I built the initial site using FrontPage 2000, a program I had never used and knew little about but happened to own.  We had no extra money to purchase any other program so FrontPage was it.

I began by simply trying various program features, often wondering what they actually did, then looking at what had changed on the screen then searching the internet for a website that could help explain what had happened and how I could turn it into what I thought I wanted.  You see, not having a working knowledge of either HTML or CSS, I often didn't know what much of it did or was suppose to do.

OK, it wasn't an efficient design method but by September I managed to build a 38 page website and get it online and without a single broken hyperlink.  In early 2006 I upgraded to FrontPage 2003.  Wow, that was really cool compared to FP 2000.

Until July 2006 I was using only the click and drag features of FrontPage to build and maintain the site.  With starting our business and all that entails, learning code was not a priority.  Not yet anyway.

Up to this point no one had given me any technical help, advice or suggestions on improving the website or correcting any of the many mistakes I had made.  That was about to change though however because I was about to meet Al and Al would make a big difference.

In July 2006 I sent a link request to a real estate office in Tucson and received a somewhat terse email back from them declining the link.  The reasons given were: "Your have no PR and your link page is WAY TO LONG.  It will never get PR.  50-100 links per page is TOPS most Seo's agree. Al"

Al is Alvaro Guevara of Tucson, AZ.  He owns and operates a web design business there, http://www.Tucson-WebDesign.com, and is an all around great guy that I also owe a very big "Thank you" to.  So, "Al, thank you so much for your help."

I emailed this response back to Al:

"Al, Thank you for the advice.  I will adjust my link pages as you advised.
Thanks,
David"

This began an email exchange between us where I explained that I was a full time home inspector and a part time struggling webmaster with no training or outside help other than what I read online.  Al very kindly sent several emails with suggestions for improvements for the site.

Al's suggestions resulted in two consecutive major rewrites of every page in the website.  The second of these is where I stopped using FrontPage in "wysiwyg" mode and started hand coding both HTML and CSS.  I also begin to learn HTML and CSS.

I discovered during the second rewrite that FrontPage adds extraneous, and typically useless, code randomly throughout the pages.  I had hoped that hand coding would prevent this from happening but it seemed to have no viable effect.

When the second rewrite was finished, my CSS code had successfully passed validation using the validator available on W3C.org.  I also validated each of my ~38 pages to HTML Transitional 4.01.  That took a lot of work but upon completion I sure knew the basics of CSS and HTML a lot better than I had two weeks earlier.

Within a week or so of completing that project, my partner and I met with a new home inspection client that also happens to be a web designer.  He had located us via an internet search and was quite emphatic regarding his recommendation to switch from FrontPage to Dreamweaver and Flash Studio Pro.  I guess I will have some new software to learn.

That is pretty much the story of how I ended up building the website and a few of the things that happened along the way.  Part two consists of some personal observations and learning experiences I hadwhile building the site.