Back in 1997 I was preparing several comic book projects for publication. I was going to be the publisher, so one of the things I had to do was to find someone who could color the covers of my comic book titles. The interiors were black and white.

I went to a friend of mine who owned a local comic shop. He had a three year old Power Macintosh and had had a local lady teach him the basics of using Photoshop 3 to do coloring.

I had him color a couple of covers for me. I was such a micro manager in those days that I ended up standing over his shoulder having him change everything around over and over. After doing that two or three times, and driving my friend Emil crazy, I finally decided to buy myself a computer, and learn to do it myself.

The only problem was that I didn't even know how to turn a computer on. Really. I was used to a TV, where you flick a switch and it's on. Waiting for something to warm up was a new experience to me. And I had a deadline. Not only did I have to figure out how to use a computer, but how to use a newer version of Photoshop, which I did not yet own, and color well enough to go to press.

I didn't know anything about file types yet, and as it turned out, when the iMac was first released, none of the hardware for it was compatible. I ended up using my friend Emil's scanner, saving the files I needed to disc, which I couldn't input to my computer because the disk drive was not yet compatible. I think he finally ended up having to e-mail me the files. It was an interesting time, but I've always been good under pressure. You find out who you really are when something absolutely must get done.

Anyway, I managed to pull it off and everything went to press on time.

The next step though, was to set up a website to offer all of our titles online. I figured that this was the next logical step, as it seemed that every comic book publisher had their own website. Many comic artists and writers already had their own websites.

The first version of the site was terribly simplistic. I relied on big graphics to fill the backgrounds on my pages and try to mask the fact that I really had no idea what I was doing. It was basically a bunch of big desktop like images linked together, with no text. At least no html text.

My internet service provider was EarthLink, which offered you free web space along with your internet service. They still do, as well as giving you 8 e-mail accounts.

I used their service for awhile, but then secured the domain name darkspud.com, as one of our comics was about a potato that thought he was a super hero, and fought crime. Starchy, the Dark Spud, hence the domain name.

Had I know at the time, I could have continued hosting my site at earthlink and the charges would have been included with what I was already paying each month. Due to my lack of experience though, I hosted it on a server that charged between $25.00 to $35.00 a month to host the site. Now by this time I had completely redesigned the website, and it was far more impressive to look at. I was starting to figure out what I was doing.

Being good at designing a graphics intense website doesn't make the website profitable though. So after many months of tossing money down the drain I moved my site to a free server, rather than just let it go. And that's where it stayed for several years, with little or no updates, but no cost as well. I just wanted to keep the domain name for future use, and figured I'd keep the site up in some form to have a small presence on the net.

At some point I started noticing that the banner adds that appeared at the top of each page branched out to google adds and various other advertisements. My website was being used to make money, but not by me. I also started noticing that a lot of the websites I had linked to on my links page no longer existed. Some of the sites were owned by artists that were relatively well known, yet they hadn't managed to make any money either, and just let their websites and their domain names go.

Ironically, most of the domain names still exist, but they bear no resemblance to their former selves. They were bought up by web scalpers that placed web links and affiliate links on them. They are making money off of the traffic that someone else's names and efforts created. Unfortunately the previous owners themselves did not know how to utilize their intellectual properties to make a profit. Whatever you do, don't let this happen to you. Even if you don't have a site up, you can park the domain name at an inexpensive domain registry for about $7.00 a year. Don't let someone else profit from your efforts this way.

The one comfort I had, was that I'd managed to hang on to my domain name, which I consider a potentially valuable intellectual property right, and I still had the ability to move or change the website around however and whenever I choose.

At this point my domain name was still costing me about $75.00 a year though. If you own a site that's costing you anywhere near that much for the domain name, do yourself a favor and go to www.GoDaddy.com It's about $7.00 a year for your domain name, and their service is excellent. I wish someone had told me that before. I would have saved hundreds of dollars.

You know, learning in the real world is a lot different than school. The way I learn computer applications is to take the application, read whatever direction I can on it, and then just try everything. Screw up as many times as you can, when you run out of things to do wrong, you will inevitably get it right. At least, that's what works for me. I taught a friend of mine, Mark McElligott, how to use Photoshop and some other applications. Each week when I visited him and his family at their house, I would show him all the new tricks and time savers I'd learned by trial and error, and lots of reading. It saved him a lot of time learning, and I was able to save him a lot of mistakes by saying, "whatever you do, don't do this or it will really screw things up."

I've found in all the experimenting I've done with web and graphic design that I really love Adobe products. They are the easiest to use, logically put together, and give you the most bang for your buck.

Adobe Photoshop, for example, I can do almost anything with Photoshop. Even a novice can look like a pro using Photoshop. I've used it for photographic retouching, web design, coloring and lettering comics, and even for text and font layout.

I still use Adobe Pagemill for various aspects of web design. Mainly because of it's ease of use and simplicity. It's a pretty inexpensive application as well. If you are just starting out with web design and want something basic enough to understand, and versatile enough to get the job done, this is a great application.

Though Adobe GoLive is the ultimate and supreme web tool. I use this for all uploading and deleting of files on my server. It's also one of the best tools for building and designing websites. There are a lot of things that I just couldn't do without it.

For anything fancy, like moving buttons and panels or flash and intense web animation, I use Adobe LiveMotion. I used this application almost exclusively to design a movie website that I did. I found it a lot easier to do flash animation with it than Dreamweaver or Flash. Adobe is just the best company at designing graphics programs. And they tend to be the easiest to use.

Another thing that helps me design web pages quickly is to download web templates. If you do a little searching you can even find some free ones. What I like to do is open up the page I'm working on in either Pagemill or GoLive, open up the template pages I like as well, and then just drag and drop aspects of the page that I like into my own.

It's doubtful that I'll find a template where I'm happy with the whole page, so I just splice parts I do like into my page. Also, you can always change the color of a border, box or banner you don't like by throwing it in your html editing software. Sometimes I might just like the way something is shaped. So I just drag it into Photoshop and change the graphics entirely, and often manipulate the shape as well.

I often will do something a dozen different ways and save all the changes. Then I have a dozen options to choose from. Sometimes even after all of that I'll scrap all of them and start over.

Now that's easy enough. I've already laid most of the ways out. Trust me though, there are more ways to lose money on your site than you can imagine.

*Hire an expensive firm to design it for you. Don't do this. If you have to bring someone in to design your site, there are affordable people out there. Stay away from the big companies unless you have a large business or income and can afford it. It's so much easier to purchase an inexpensive html editing software program and do it yourself. You can even download some free templates online, if you look around. It's pretty easy to import them into your html editing application, change the generic labeling on the template to something completely your own, and upload them to the internet. Trust me, it's not rocket science. Most young kids know how to do it.

*Host your site on an expensive server. Guilty. I did that when I first stated out. Lack of knowledge can be expensive. Do a little research before you spend your hard earned money. I'd recommend GoDaddy as your web hosting service, and it wont cost you more than $150.00 for two years of service. That even includes domain registration.www.GoDaddy.com waves the domain registration if you sign up for their hosting services. You get about 5000 megs worth of web space, and it's around $70.00 for two years hosting service. I don't think there is anyone out there offering a better price for the services they provide. They have excellent customer service. They are very helpful and they have real live people that will call you if you need assistance with anything. Or you could use EarthLink to host your site for free if you already use them as your Internet Service Provider.

*Pay for expensive advertising or for services that promise you listing on all the major search engines. There are only a handful of search engines worth listing your site on. Definitely hit Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, and Ask Jeeves. Maybe one or two others. Other than that, you'd be looking at services that are to small to do you any good, and if you used them you'd just be wasting your time. Besides, you can easily sign up yourself for a listing.

As far as advertising goes, if you sign up for pay per clicks or banner adds, make sure you can place a limit on how much you are willing to spend each month. Otherwise you can quickly throw a ton of money down the drain that may not even be bringing you any results. For information on how to advertise or increase traffic on your website, take a look at a couple of Affiliate Master's books that have really helped me out.

*Don't spend time on intense graphic art design that is composed of large file sizes and takes longer for your audience to load. While there are a lot more people out there with cable and dsl connections on their computers, and increasing demand for graphic intense websites, you have to be aware of who your audience is. If most of your audience is going to be on faster computers, it may be worth your while to design a graphic intense website, or you could offer a Flash and html version. The majority of people are still using standard 56k modems though, so take that into account if you want the most traffic on your site. When I'm using a computer with a 56k modem, I will often just click off of the page if it takes to long to load.

*If you are creating or writing anything on your website, make sure to post somewhere that the work you've done is © and/or ™ with your name and the year after it. For graphics and artwork, label each individual piece of art. Otherwise you are liable to see your work pop up on other websites, and people profiting from your efforts.

*Unfinished sites and broken links are a great way to lose money on the internet. Before you list your site anywhere you need to make sure that enough of it is already completed to meet your goal, and satisfy your visitors. Also test everything out once you've uploaded your site. There is nothing more frustrating than realizing that an important page on your site has been inaccessible for an undeterminable length of time.

I'm sure there are dozens of ways you can think of to lose money online. These are just a few big ones to avoid.

Basically, just do the exact opposite of the "How to lose money on your website section."
Some basics you can do, as far as the design aspects are:

*Place your page links either at the top of the page, or to the right. Why? When search engines use their software, often called web crawlers, to determine the content of your page for their search engine results, they usually come in from the top left hand side of your page and work their way down. They usually only read the first paragraph or two. So you want to make sure and use certain key words in the first paragraph or two that accurately describe the content of your site. You'll notice that I didn't do that on this site. I'm actually taking a calculated risk by doing that, but this site has been up so long that it's already achieved a "4" ranking of "10". So I don't have to work as hard to get a higher ranking as a new site would. If it doesn't work out, I'll just switch it later.

*Unless your site is all about graphics, concentrate more on content, and update your site frequently. You can only look at the same graphics so long before you get bored. If you want repeat visitors you need to give them a reason to come back. The more interesting your content, and the more often you update it, the more people will frequent your site.

*The key to making money on a website is driving traffic to your site, and keeping them coming back by providing good content or services on your site. When you get to the point that you have thousands of visitors a week, you can charge money for businesses to advertise on your site. It's also easier to sell goods or services with heavy traffic on your website.

*A simple layout is often the most effective. Keep your site easy to navigate, with all your linking pages clearly marked. If a visitor gets lost or confused on your site they are liable to just click off. Again, fancy graphics alone will not keep people coming back to your site. Often times a more basic layout is better. That's a rule I have to continuously drill in my own head, as I much prefer a complex graphic intense website. This site is more so than my other ones.

*Use one of these three basic fonts for the text on your site, as they are the most commonly used on websites, and easily read by most web browsers:

Arial, Verdana, or Tahoma.

*Set up a mailing list. People don't automatically check your site every day to see if it's been updated. So if you offer to place interested visitors on a mailing list, you can notify them every time you update your website with more information or content. People tend to forget about things as well. A mailing list reminds them that you are still out there. If you have time, it doesn't hurt to send out a newsletter to your mailing list. People will appreciate the effort, and it often gives your repeat visitors a more thorough view of what's new on your site, and how it's beneficial to them.

*Respond to e-mails from your visitors personally if you can. This builds relationships and trust, and people will spend more time on your website if they like and trust you. They are also more likely to tell other people about your site.

Those are the basics. I'm not a pro at building keyword driven, massively profitable websites. So, again, if you want to learn everything you can on the subject, I'd suggest you learn from an expert Affiliate Master's course.

If you are just interested in the basics, you can always google your queries of interest.