Aloha Update is on the Web
Second website from the 12 sites in 12 months goal has been published.
Yesterday at 5:00 pm central standard time www.AlohaUpdate.com went online. The site is about living in Hawaii, Visiting Hawaii, and general information about the islands. As I have mentioned before I live on the island of Oahu with my girlfriend. We are both fairly active people and enjoy traveling. In the last year and a half we been to many places within the islands and have had many experiences and want to write about them and share out pictures.
We’ve swam with dolphins, hiked on lava fields, surfed Waikiki waves, snorkeled all over, and hiked a few mountains. This site actually accomplishes two tasks. For one we needed a place where we can keep our friends and family updated and jealous as to the adventures we are having. Hopefully if we write enough interesting things they will want to come and visit us. The second thing the site does is help accomplish my goal of 12 sites in 12 months goal.
My hope is that Aloha Update becomes very search engine friendly as I build the pictures and content of the site over the coming months. I have been told that people referred to sites through a search engine are the most likely to click through ads. If this is true, I figure people searching for things about Hawaii will find the Google AdSense ads very helpful. Within one hour of having the ads up on the net all but 2 were tailored to exactly what was on the page. Unlike my first site, this one, the ads make sense.
Another result that came from working on this content based website is that I am learning a lot about design and implementation. One of the most important things I’ve learned is to have a really good idea about the formatting for the site before you get into the coding, especially if you have multiple pages. I have been told the easiest way to format different portions of a site, if you don’t use php and stick with straight html, is to use include files. That way you change one file to make site wide changes. Next site I make this will probably be done, for now Aloha Update will continue to use CSS. To be more specific it was built using a modified CSS template from dreamweaver. I used the basic formatting idea and then hacked up the code.
All in all I would say the site is already a success. I have learned plenty and had fun writing about where we’ve been. If people visit, great. If they click through the ads, even better. We’ll keep updating it and see what happens. Now it’s on to the next site…