The idea spawns content, design, usability and interaction.

Once I have an idea in my head, I brainstorm content and features in OneNote.

Then comes usability.

Then comes basic design.

Then comes the coding.

Then comes iteration of all of the above and lots of sleepless nights

Currently I am developing:

http://www.moorespeed.co.uk

http://www.getmecooking.com

I have started:

http://www.baconaholic.com – a fun site about bacon

but I have been too busy with the above websites to spend any time on it. I will get round to it someday.

I created these StackExchange sites:

http://london.stackexchange.com/ – Q&A site about London

http://sapbasis.stackexchange.com/ – Q&A site about SAP BASIS

http://www.starbase24.com/ – Q&A site about the Star Trek Online MMORPG

But they didn’t get off the ground. The feedback I was getting from the Star Trek gaming community was that they didn’t understand the concept of the site, so just stuck with forums and sites with FAQ pages. This is a real shame as forums and FAQ pages are really terrible ways of getting information to questions and the StackExchange sites are excellent.

and then there is:

http://www.performit.co.uk – I updated it recently, but it needs a decent design (currently looks rubbish)

http://www.performit.co.uk/network/ – I haven’t updated this in years and I’m not planning to

http://www.techboy.co.uk – haven’t updated this is ages. Lots I would like to add (in particular results of races) but other things take priority. I haven’t got much incentive to work on this

http://blog.techboy.co.uk – I would like to tweak the design (it is currently quite hard to read) and add my own logo. maybe change the entire template. Any ideas? I would also like to add more content, but I haven’t really got much incentive to do so

I have recently created Stack Exchange sites for London and SAP BASIS. Neither of these have taken off though.

Maybe the London one has too small an audience – as there are only 7.421 million people  (2004 estimate) living there and only a very small percentage of them would want to use a Q&A site about London. Of course a large number of people visit London, but I don’t know if they would spend time asking and waiting for answers.

The SAP BASIS site is ideal for SAP BASIS questions, but it has actually been hard to advertise as SAP BASIS is a niche market and the SAP sites that I have visited don’t allow promotion of external SAP websites. I tried to post about it on the SAP IT Toolbox website, but it was blocked by a moderator. I have posted on a few sites, but it hasn’t brought in much traffic.

http://epicadvice.com/ is a World of Warcraft game based site, based on Stack Exchange framework. It is doing quite well, so that gave me the idea to create a similar site for Star Trek Online. So today I created the site LCARS – Star Trek Online, created 25 questions and publicised it on some Star Trek Online related websites and Stumbleupon. So far it has had 197 visits, 307 page views but 0 new users, questions or answers…

Maybe I should create some dummy users and answer some of the questions, to give the impression that the site is active? I might do that tomorrow.

I do feel that once I have 1 really active site (i.e. thousands of visitors per day), it then makes it easier to publicise other websites from that main website. This seems to be the formula used by other companies.

I also have a Facebook account which I use daily, which is useful for socialising with others, but it’s a great concept, very poorly implemented.

I use other sites such as FriendFeed and Plaxo for letting people know what I’m doing on various websites around the web.

I use Twitter for quick, instant updates on what I’m doing right now.

And there are other tools I use too (e.g. Google Reader, Google and Plaxo calenders, etc.).

So why have a blog? Well a blog will allow me to provide mainly textual updates on what I’m up to right now, and what I have recently been up to, my plans and general thoughts. It’s quicker and easier to update than static web pages, plus it is more feature rich, purposeful and basically, the way that it should be done. Of course it is better if it is integrated into my website, so I’ll do that.

I have looked at web hosted blogs (my preferred option), but as of right now I haven’t found any that are nearly as feature rich as I would like. WordPress seems to have the most flexibility so I have installed and configured it and am now giving it a try.