Ways To Speed Up Productivity
 

I guess this goes out to all the free site/avs site builders. Im looking for ways to speed up building sites. Might also be a good guide for newbies.

Here are some things I do.

1) Recip tables are stored in txt files for easy copy/paste
2) Warning textarea stored in seperate file

Sadly thats about all I got right now but here are some things im trying to work on.

- Good text ads as well as custom banners done with SSI
- Photoshop automation for resizing pics

I would say site templates but I find building a new one each time keeps my design skills fresh and creative.

So what tips do you got to help speed up site building?

you're off to a good start...I do the recip thing, I have recips for each category I sub to saved on a separate html page. Takes a while to get it all together but it's worth gold ;) Also I have one page where I keep all my little shortcuts ie: code snippets, onmouseover code, warning texts (I have several), and anything else I use a lot for styles etc. Then I can just keep that page open when designing to cut & paste stuff I need.
I also use a bare bones template with the stuff & a table - I have one for each domain I use to submit so metas & copyright info is all there. Same with a bare bones css file. Then I just copy & paste the templates into the new folder & away I go...still from scratch but it saves me some time.

Doesn't sound like much but saves me lots of time. I like to do everything else from scratch (ads, text etc) and I don't use SSI so that's about it for me :)

I hope you get some other tidbits, maybe I can add some to my repertoire :)

Hmmmm I'm looking into the ad automation too, possibly with SSI. My problem is with incorporating this in html files. The only way around it that I can see now is use folders structure, and have the files named index.shtml (or probably index.php).

Some photoshop automation is very helpful! I often like to work with square thumbs though, so I still do the actual crop by hand.

This one's very generic and involves no nifty tricks, but if you master time management you'll be way ahead of 99% of the crowd.

If you're anything like me and sit down in front of your computer in the morning with the resolve to "get some work done" chances are you won't.

You start out by opening DW ans PS. Then you read the boards for 15 minutes. Then you check some stats for half an hour. Time for a cup of coffee. Answer some emails. Browse the content at 3 or 4 sponsors. Download a few zips and discard most of it. Visit Amazon. Check the boards. A quick trip to Subway for lunch. Build the index page of a freesite. Chat with a guy in Europe. And so on and so forth. At the end of 8 hours "hard work" you have produced half a freesite.

You need more than a to-do list. You must identify what needs to be done, weed out time wasting non-productive activities, prioritize that list, set up a time table and stick to it. Don't go to bed unless your list is cleared.

Sounds boring and rigid? Believe me, once you hone this skill (and it is a skill) you'll have a lot more free time on your hands.

Specific tips.

- Greenie once made a post that boiled down to building 4 freesites a day for a full month. Submit one the day you build it and schedule the remainder for submission 1,2 and 3 months down the road respectively. At the end of the 1st month you'll have an inventory of 90 freesites for future submission.

- Don't waste your time going to the sponsor site looking for content every time you build a site. Download 10 or 20 sets at a time, select, optimize and thumb everything so when you need it just grab and insert on your pages.

- Unplug your phone, lock up the kids and pets, send your wife off to work. In short eliminate all distractions and get down to business. :D

What Lemmy said :)

No serious those are all very good points. I actually did the "don't go to bed until your list is cleared" thing yesterday. I went to bed at 2:30 am :)

Completely agree with what Lemmy said about Time Management.

The recip tables and photoshop automation help bunches.

Another thing, may not help now, is to keep a spread sheet of sites you built and who you sub to. Over time what happens is you stop subbing to some and add new ones. Down the road you will see you had some good selling freesites you have not subbed to a handfull of great places. On those busy days when other things take precedent you can mirror one of those and sub it in about 30 minutes total.

If I wasn't in Vegas I'd find that thread myself :D

Here it is. It's a VERY NICE feeling knowing you won't have to build another freesite for 3 months. :D

Damn greenie, thats a hell of an idea. I sometimes stress out if its late in the day and I got no sites ready to go.

Any tips on the actual building of the sites than can help one speed up a bit?

I think things listed here are really good. SSI or PHP Includes can be used for inserting things like 2257 links at the bottom of every page. Another way to speed up the process, which may not be as SE friendly as you'd like, is to name all pics and thumbs the same (so 1-20 or 1-30.jpg) so you can easily put thumbs and links on your gallery pages.

One trick I know of is this...
folder/
folder/pics/
folder/thumbs/

Name thumbs and pics the same using your own naming convention. So
pics/sexy-babe-01.jpg
thumbs/sexy-babe-01.jpg

Put all thumbs on the gallery page, do a quick copy and paste so that the thumb links to the thumb. At the end of getting the gallery pages ready just do a find and replace for href="pics/ and change it to href="thumbs/

That's a gold mine of infromation :)

Remember this thread?
Take a look at post 25 from Linkster. Although the thread is coming up to 2 years old I still think its one of the best of its kind I've ever seen. Read it - its worth plenty of money. :)

That link was what I was thinking of. I'm about to actually start using the advice now that I'm a couple FreeSites away from having at least 30 templates to cycle through. Will continue to now and again make new templates because I keep getting better and better at creating sites. :D It will be nice to just have a stable of them to get out when strapped for time on other projects like I have been currently.

Then I built myself a recip generator so I load all the recips into a DB. Recently I added to it a tier system so people like penisbot and wet that like being together get grouped together for example. So then all I have to do is remove it from the DB and it's out or I also have a part to put things on deactive status so if for whatever reason they are down for awhile or I'm just waiting to see if they actually will accept my freesites before I continue on building for them and giving out link love.

I also spend some days where I'm just kinda in a zombie state |potleaf||potleaf| just cutting content and getting things all in order as well. So when time comes I have stuff ready to roll.

Some of those days are the most productive for me in the long run |potleaf|
I do the shit I have to do for the LL then I spark up and look at the pretty pictures for a few hours :) I mostly work from CD's so I cruise through them, pull out whatever seems like a good idea for a freesite, gallery or AVS and put them in folders, optimise them if need be, do very basic gallery pages and pick sponsor banners or whatever I want to sell with them.
Then when I'm ready to build all of the grunt work is done so I just build ;)
I've usually got around 5 AVS sites, 5 free sites and a few galleries that just need some words and inspiration to be ready.
I find very loud rebel music helps throughout the whole process :)

Another way to build the sites would be to use PHP. You could do all of the SSI calls with includes. I am working on one now where it uses a gallery script with all my includes already there. The gallery script auto creates the thumbnail on the first hit. Just need to change color and layout etc. in the core PHP file and upload. Once I get this done I could crank out about 4-6 in an hour or two...

Dapanther99

Yes it is. That's why Greenie gets the big bucks.

I tried making four sites/day for a month and after about ten days my brain was fried from trying to build four sites/day in the same niche with new, different and interesting sales text. Might be just me. I cut back to two and sometimes three sites/day and it worked for me great. At the end of a month I had well over seventy sites ready in a "submit queue" that were sitting there waiting for their submit date. It definitely IS a good feeling knowing you can work on other projects and not let your free site building/submitting suffer.

I might be wrong. |crazy| BUT I think the point of his tip was basically that you use the same template 4 times for 4 different niches of content. Sooo the html pages are already laid out you just need to fill with content and then you have for that day of the next 3 months something to submit. |thumb

So after a month of doing it you have 3 months covered. This allows other projects to come alive. Then all you do is submit the daily one that is lined up in the txt file or however you have decided to track things. I say txt file because I believe that's what |greenguy| mentioned in the tip.

Cheers,
Be