My website has been a colossal undertaking, with me being a one-man team, add to that a demanding marketing job. Lot of thought has gone into each small element of the whole site, but it still remains one of my best lessons in branding and consumer understanding that I have experienced to date.

Given that I have been light-years away from coding and the like, I wanted something that would enable me to put up a website with minimal programming but maximum functionality.

In this write-up, I walk you through the step-wise thought process that went into getting to where this site is today.

First was the purpose of the site itself. As is true for any brand, it has to have a purpose to exist, and should be built, armed and positioned to work towards that purpose. I started off with two of my basic passions that would form the main pages: writing and music; and one of my hobbies, photography. The question now was whether I would write humor, as that is more readable and enjoyable and hence would give me repeat readers, or would I write about my own life, as that would be for my own future reference. Then the question of what technology to use, what would form the interface, how would I get ‘trials’, how would I get repeat readers, how will I get the word to spread etc etc.

Hey! wait a minute…

Too much chaos inside the cranium. Let me restart, and this time actually use some of the thinking that I am supposed to be good at.

1. Who? (A.K.A “Who’s your daddy!?”)

Who am I putting up this website for? If it is for myself, it will be a chronicle of my own life, my experiences, my views, but more importantly, for my own reference. If it is for the world at large, then humor would be a clear winner, or interesting, intelligent articles like this one :D

Given the fact that I don’t want to be pleasing every click-happy lost soul in the web world, nor do I want it to be a one person online existence, I decide my target group (TG) has to be a mix of both, hence defining my content to be a mix of humor and biographical entries.

2. Content (A.K.A “Yeh andar ki baat hai”)

Content is the king, it is rightly said. Good content will pull in the crowd, no matter what. Given my prolific laziness, I have to think about how much content to have before I launch so that I can drudge along as readers digest my sarcasm. Enter a timely inspiration from Douglas Adams, and I land a wonderful way to link my memories to places in Singapore with funny laughable instances, and Marvinisms are born. But then again, how many would be interested in whatever is going on in my life? So I try to nicely intersperse boring long articles between oodles of satire (like this frickin’ huge article, for example).

Along with that is the format, the look of the blog and the photoblog (Wordpress and Pixelpost templates tweaked to look the same), carefully selected pictures, the library sidebar to bring some color and halo some pseud intelligence into the blog, recent posts and comments positioned perfectly for clickability, and we are set to go!

3. The Launch (A.K.A “Uncle, yeh Reply-All aur Reply mein koi farak to nahi hai na?!”)

No rocket science this. Since there isn’t specific marketing budget to speak of, I do a blanket ping to everyone on Orkut/Gmail/Wherever. The real trick lies in actually participating in the blogosphere, discussing, agreeing to rants, joining in flames etc. Will do all that as and when I find interesting enough blogs, and with near to 1000 page visits in 2 weeks (not even counting first 2 days of launch), I’m not doing too bad even for now, methinks.

4. The Critical Connect (A.K.A “The Big F**k up” A.K.A “O! bhenc***!”)

All the while, spending weeks with PHP, MySql, testing on my own laptop with Reactor, beta testing the links and the traffic on the host, I was praising my favorite Firefox and its many webmaster plugins, that enabled quick debugging. It wasn’t until the day after launch, when I looked at the stats, that the shit hit the fan.

Mozilla Firefox: 35.4% Internet Explorer: 63.2% Others: 1.4%

I frantically opened the IE link (which must’ve been really surprised to have ever been used) and logged onto http://harishnarayanan.com and horrors! it wasn’t even close to what I intended it to be. My Microsoft-hugging majority is yet to come out of its technological Neolithic era and has thus banished my beautiful site to Jpeg obscurity. Gaaaa!

Think like your TG. To the very last stupid moronic detail.

(4 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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