In no particular order, here are some of the things I have learned while building our website.

• Good web design doesn't just happen
• Planning doesn't always work out
• Excellent copy writing skills are critical but, unfortunately, rare
• There is more to font selection and font size than I had ever imagined
• Improper font selection has been rumored to incite mass hysteria
• Color selection and use can get out of hand very quickly
  • Using the wrong color can apparently make your reader instantly hostile
  • Using the right color will still apparently irritant some of your readers
  • Colors carry more meaning than I would have ever imagined
• Browser compatibility is somehow related to voodoo
• Lots of people use IE
• Lots of people don't use IE
• Lots of people seem to really dislike IE, write long articles about it's shortcomings and then write code for it anyway
• HTML, CSS and XHTML were just capital letters when I started this project
  • They are still just capital letters but now I know what they stand for
• I thought I knew what the term "keyword" meant
• Researching keywords seems to take a lot of time
• Keywords seem to generate anxiety
• There is a big difference between 'keywords' and 'keyword phrases'
• It is easy to find good help and information on the internet once you know what keyword phrase to type in
• Who would have thought it was called that?
• You need a number of meta tags on every page
• Some of the meta tags are the same on every page and some aren't
• Meta tags seem to generate some anxiety too
• Features and benefits are still confusing, (e.g., it's not your grass seed, it's my lawn)
• Writing copy that gets your prospect to even think about taking action seems nearly impossible
• There are magic "action" words that are used when you write good copy
• No one will tell me what they are
• There are a minimum of six best ways to do everything and all other ways are inferior
• I need an autoresponder
• I need better copy so I have a use for the autoresponder I bought
• I need a business newsletter
• Newsletters are typically very time consuming
• I need a business blog
• I simply need more business to support everything else
• Trying to understand PPC will make you take a deep breath, shudder and pucker all at the same time
• Selecting a SEO strategy isn't exactly a straight forward process
• Selecting a SEO strategy seems to include a "nagging doubt" side effect
• Site optimization is very, very critical
• No one seems to agree how site optimization should be done
• Selecting a link strategy seems to be just as critical as site optimization
• No one agrees on what the best link strategy is either
• Picking a domain name isn't as easy as you might think
  • Domain names, at least to some degree, seem to depend upon what internet article you read just before registering the name and what article you read just afterwords
  • This factor alone seems to determine whether that night you sleep soundly or see the eerie outline of doom and despair clearly in front of you all night long
• You need some SEO tools
  • You have no clue which ones you need
  • At least there are free SEO tools available
  • Every site's free SEO tools are the best
  • The free ones are good enough for starters
  • There still isn't money for additional software
  • It is a given, one of Murphy's Law's I believe, that the SEO tools you are not using are either vastly inferior or vastly superior to the SEO tools you are using and every SEO tool article you read confirms this fact
  • Only the expensive SEO tools that you can not afford work effortlessly each and every time and every SEO tool article you read robustly confirms this fact
  • Seemingly everyone that authors internet articles regarding SEO tools claim that all other SEO tool article authors lie habitually
  • It seems that SEO tool article authors really do lie but they do not realize it for some reason
  • The best choice to stop the whole SEO tool insanity is to simply pick the free SEO tools you like, use them and simply forgot about the others
  • You can never forget completely
  • The SEO tool rule above holds true with one exception.  If you plan on marketing your product internationally the free SEO tools won't work and you really do need to purchase the expensive SEO tools.  At that point I'm not sure what you do as I don't deal with international markets.  I strongly suspect that for those unfortunate souls that must travel this lonely path, the world is never quite the same again.
• I still read a lot of internet articles trying to understand how to improve my website
• As usual, most articles say the other authors are wrong
• Every verified, validated and proven method of doing anything website or internet related is totally and completely different than every other verified, validated and proven method for doing the same thing in every other internet article on the same topic
• You need to optimize your website to get a good search engine ranking
• No one agrees how to do this it seems
• Everyone's optimization strategy is the best
• You need a robot
• You have to make your own robot
• Robots are cool
• Don't ever make Google mad for any reason
• At some point you will blow it with Google
• You should use a search engine submittal site to mass register your website with the different search engines
• Using a mass search engine submittal site is the kiss of death and you might as well hang it up, shut it down and turn off the lights because you just blew it big time
• I wish I knew which one of those last two statements was the most true
• What is Yahoo really?
  • You eventually begin to question if any of the sites listed there are real?
  • How did they get on Yahoo anyway?
  • More importantly though, how do I get listed on Yahoo?
• I confirmed that Rule #1 is true.
  • Rule #1: Everything costs a lot more than you think it will and you need everything at least once a day or more.
• I reached a point when I actually learned enough to ask my ISP if they had widget X.
  • I then found out that not only did they have it, they have had it from the start
  • They had wondered a little why I hadn't already asked them for it but they didn't want to be too nosy
  • The kicker here is that I had no clue to ask for it until I read the article
  • I need to schedule more time for reading
• What I still don't know would scare me a lot if I knew about it
• Amateur webguys use way too many colors
• Amateur webguys center way too much text
• The nest egg you saved and set aside to carry you over while the business takes off is and never, ever will be any where close to big enough to cover all the things you and the business need and had not anticipated.
• You simply accept this fact, make the best of it and keep making it happen one day to the next
• One day you enter one of your keyword phrases into a search engine and your site shows up on page one
• You here strange and incredible tales that claim this can also happen on Google
• You learn that the site is really never finished and that you are never really done
• I developed a certain cautious respect for nested ul and ol lists
• It's been a wonderful experience
• I have learned so much since I started and I continue to learn every day
• There is so much I don't know it's scary
• When does the new SitePro newsletter arrive?
• How does Dreamweaver work?

Thanks once again to SitePro News and Al Guevara.  You both have been instrumental in the building of Sunland Home Inspection.

Enough web stuff, let's get back to the exciting world of Professional Home Inspection.