...crediblyuser friendly and informative, and at the same time earn a bitof revenue from Google Adsense! Why not?So with this great little idea, I blindly set off and started tocreate what was going to be a online resource of complimentaryrecipes on www.mom2me.com.This brings me to my biggest and most costly mistake ever. Lackof planning!I cannot stress the importance of this aspect enough. I wouldhave saved myself literally weeks, if not months, by simplysitting down with a pie...

...ce of paper and planning my layoutcarefully.In all fairness to myself, I must say that I am not a sitedesigner by any stretch of the imagination, but was ratherfinding my way around the wonderful world of web design and painby an uncalculated process of trial and error.In summary: Plan, plan and then plan some more.If you still doubt why I stress the importance of planning, Iwill explain in practical terms what happened to me in thecreation of my site. If this doesn't bring the message home,nothing will!Scripts in the Header section of your site. As I mentionedearlier, I really wanted to make the site simple and easy tonavigate. All the recipes on the site should be easy to copy,paste, mail to a friend and even bookmark.Well, this is where my first blunder crept in. I decided to makeuse of some great little scripts on the site to enable users tomail recipes to friends at the touch of a button and alsobookmark the page rather effortlessly.The scripts were really simple to incorporate, but after doingabout 100 recipes, I read an article explaining the dangers ofadding 'full' scripts in the header section of your pages. Ilearnt that by adding to many scripts in this section of thepage makes it difficult for the 'bots' to read the content andthat it could adversely effect your Page rank and Search engineplacing.This is not a good idea as you might imagine and thus I spentseveral days rewriting every single page and placing the scriptsinto separate JavaScript files. This was not the last time I didthis!Search Facility I really wanted to make it easy for visitors tobe able to search for content on my site but I decide to leavethat as a phase two of my development. Mistake!After stumbling across Google's great 'search my site" facilityI decided to add it to my site. Great idea, but due to the factthat I didn't add proper Meta Keywords on every page I had asmall problem to overcome.Yep you guessed it. I had to redo every single page on the siteyet again. Ouch!The base tag functionality Deciding to make use of the base tagfunctionality within Dream Weaver was a great idea to simplifymy designing process, but...When finely it was time to create my sitemap I suddenly realizedthat I had countless (almost a hundred) broken links andalthough it was my own stupidity I still had to re-do almost allmy links, on all my pages. Watch out for this. It is an absolutespirit crusher!My advise, make use of the full URL in all your links on allyour pages i.e. http://www.mom2me.com/promo.htmSite Navigation I have left the best for last. Due to a completeand utter lack of proper planning, I realized that I omitted asection of the site for people to sign up for my Newsletter.As everybody who has probably ever done a site knows, this is acrucial part of your site. Whether you are selling directly fromyour site or whether you plan to do mailing campaigns at a laterstage with some marketing material on them, it is crucial tocollect as many e-mail addresses as possible, as often aspossible.Well, this forced me to redo the very basics of my pages and ...yup redo every single page again.Now, by now you might feel sorry for me or you might just feelthat I am a complete and utter idiot. Regardless of yourfeelings, I think that from this very practical example it isabundantly obvious that a lack of proper planning will only leadto heart ache and countless sleepless nights. (I think Iactually have even less hair!)Plan your site carefully and live happily ever after!