I suppose no one who has never started a website before says to themselves, “I think I will start five websites. ” I certainly didn’t. I only had the ability to start one site at a time. But it has been hard to decide how to market this one site and to whom, as my target audience is a bit diverse.
- Homeschoolers interested in the experiences and opinions of other older homeschooling parents
- Homeschoolers interested in Classical Education
- Classical schools interested in curriculum
- Christian parents interested in Christian topics that could be discussed with their teenage children
- Christians with or without kids interested in books and discussing them from a Christian perspective
- Homeschoolers needing a Texas History curriculum
My original idea was to get my homeschool and classical school curricula up on the site and available for others to use. I also wanted to write about books and articles I had read that might be of interest to others with interests similar to mine. But this has taken a while. I have also used this time to learn about the inner workings of websites and to experiment with blogging and website design. So it has not been a quick process to get all the info I have posted on my site.
I recently started to put the Texas History on Location curriculum on the Poor Potsherd site. As I worked, I realized the curriculum could really use its own site. There is a lot of information and having another site would allow me to make the information more accessible and the site more targeted. So I created a new site: TexasHistoryOnLocation.com. It has not launched yet as I am still working on it.
Creating a new site has given me some more insight into how sites are created because even though I used the same webhost, my experience this time was different from my first experience. The first time, I was asked to accept a lot of items as I went through the creation process that I was unfamiliar with. This time I was more familiar with some items, but I wasn’t asked as much about adding things. So it helped me to understand what kinds of things are standard to a site and what kinds are part of the marketing of the webhost. So I plan to capture the experience more thoroughly and let you know what I am learning this time around.
I also plan to rethink the audience for Poorpotsherd.com and to consider breaking up some of the other information into separate sites. Maybe a lot of bloggers go through this rethinking. You start with a general idea of what you want to discuss but as you progress you can begin to narrow it down. But if this is so, that bloggers have this inner turmoil, it is not apparent. I just don’t come up on sites where this process is taking place. The sites I visit all seem very focused and assured in their audience. It’s disconcerting to a new blogger like me. But I keep telling myself that the other bloggers have been at it a while and know what they are doing.
Also, I have realized that making the information I want to share available will take more time that I originally thought. So, note to self: It takes longer than you might think to organize and design a website and to get the information on the site.
Second note to self: That’s ok.
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