I had a Dream - I had an Idea - I could make Thousands - all I had to do was build a website!. Sounded quite simple 6 months ago, but that was 6 months ago. This is a brief, but true story about the realities of website development on a shoe string and with no college IT training.

I did mention this was a true story, so I'll bare all. Last November I reached a major junction in my life. I was working 60 hrs a week in a highly stressful position, then I had my 50th birthday. Something snapped, in a nut shell I quit my job which horrified my family as mine was the main income. I had burned out and had enough.

All my life I have had a dream to be a writer, but knew realistically I didn't have the talent or skill to be such, so next best thing was to build a website. I mean I'd read it was easy and you can earn a whole lot of money. How stupid could I have been.

As I mentioned earlier, I knew nothing about development, just thought I could buy a domain name add content and that was it. I remember the very first day I registered how2begin, I went out that night and celebrated 'I had a website'. Oops!. Next day I discovered I had to build the site. HELP!, not being a person to give up, after 3 days of solid researching on the Internet, I was still no further advanced, then in steps my honourable teenage daughter Sam and simply says just buy a "website in a box".

Ok, now I'm away. I soon became almost obsessed both with my ideas for content and creating the right image. None of which worked. Basically you get what you pay for, a cheap website builder will get you nowhere (unless it's just a page or so you require). Support from this company was practically useless and chargeable so I decided to teach myself html. as I had discovered there was a back door into my site, which hopefully would allow me to add and display content as I wanted. Still again I was coming up against BRICK walls, it seemed everything I wanted to do was ‘not permissible'.

I did eventually have the semblance of a site, which wasn't really that bad and decided to go live. No one visited, I really mean No One. So again it was back to learning what I had done wrong. I started to buy all the ‘you must have's to boost your ranking & traffic' what a waste of money. Then for weeks I went into every forum I could find, not posting, but just reading, sucking up all the information I could acquire, by now months down the line I really had become obsessed. I would liken it to ‘being plucked from your home environment and dropped in the middle of a jungle with an alien tribe and with no means of communication or resources that you understood to help you exist'. But would I give up – NO WAY. As far as I was concerned, I had gone beyond the point of no return. So 12 + hours a day at my PC was becoming the norm.

I finally decided that I had to start posting in forums and asking questions if I was going to get anywhere and keep on learning. I have to add at this point, posting in forums was the only truly sensible thing I did in this whole venture. I really started to learn, indeed I'm, still doing so, but it was from a forum, that I had my lucky break (we all need these now and again).

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