Advice for a novice webmaster?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

OK so I’m finally gonna do it. I’m launching an adult website. Because of my experience as a sometime photographer, I helped a friend start an adult website five years ago. Last year it grossed over a million. Recruiting models for him, and subsequently building recruiting relationships with other sites when I had recruits who weren’t a match for his site, I’ve had enough hands on experience in the biz to give it a go myself. Instead of sending all my recruits to California to make money for someone else, in other words, I’m gonna just keep it local and have them make money for me.

Besides, hello? Living the dream? And then there’s the whole “recession proof” thing.

But I don’t have enough capital to just hand over a blank check to a web designer and say “make it happen.” So the dude who’s helping me put the actual site together, well, this is his first site. He took a class. Me, I used to design websites, in the mid nineties, when knowing nothing but HTML still made me competitive. I gave it up when it began to involve too much homework (what kind of style sheets?).

I’m using godaddy.com for now, and they have free tech support, but the hold is typically 15 minutes, and I feel like an idiot waiting 15 minutes to ask what turns out to be a retardedly simple question.

So I’m turning the teeming. Any of you experienced webmaster out there mind sharing some of your knowledge with this novice, help me get this thing up and earning? It would be much appreciated.

First question: wtf. I mean ftp. I uploaded a bunch of files to my ftp folder, I think, but now I can’t for the life of me figure out how to access them. I know, extremely rudimentary, I promise I’ll slap myself in the forehead when someone points out the painfully obvious, but meanwhile . . .

I’m in my filezilla window, I type in the domain name, then the username and password I assigned, but all I find is an empty folder. I watched the files upload; took several hours. I know they’re up there somewhere. Anyone? A little help?

2

Far too much for me to personally get involved with, but are you sure GoDaddy will allow this kind of site?
Not that they (or other site providers) are necessarily prudes, but they often have very strict regulations against adult websites for whole bunches of legal and bandwidth reasons.
There are some site providers who offer those kinds of services for adult websites, but you might have to do some research to find them and they might charge you a lot more than you have planned in your budget.
Just thought I would mention that before you get too involved in creating this…

3

Yes, godaddy allows adult sites, as long as no laws are broken. They’re charging me $170 for a year’s worth of unlimited bandwidth and storage. Seemed like a good deal all around.

4

Ah. Designing adult websites. Now this is a subject I have some considerable experience in.

Did you upload the files into a folder? Was the folder in the correct heirarchy, or did you, as I suspect, accidentally put it in a root folder that isn’t accessed via http?

I recommend you find a hosting company of some reliability, with your own server(s), a personally hired competent sysadmin, and other reliable team members, as soon as you can afford to. You need to have the control of, and access to, everything, if you want it to all go smoothly.

5

That’s pretty much my plan, GL. Only instead of trying to raise, what, $10,000? $50,000? to launch it “right,” I figured I’d launch it small–I’ve shot 12 models; I figure that’s a good start–and let the site pay for its own improvements. My goal: MTV Cribs in one year. “This is my upstairs pool . . .”

6

Oh and, I figured out the ftp thing. I used to know this shit; I designed several sites in the mid nineties. But the details fade . . .

7

I hope this doesn’t come off as snobby, but it will because I am a Web design professional…but…really dude? Seriously? You are going to build an entire business around a technology that one person took one class on and you hobbied in 15 years ago? You can’t even figure out your site structure and you plan to make hundreds of thousands of dollars off this?

Any site that is going to draw the kind of visitors to make you decent money is going to need a dedicated host. If you have enough content worth viewing, you’re going to need a database and dynamic content. Sites with logins need a secure certificate and if you collect money you need a payment gateway (tip: make sure you check with your gateway to see that they support adult content, many don’t).

Thinking you’re gonna make the next big porn site with rudimentary HTML knowledge is like thinking you’re going to make a really kickass house out of matchsticks. It can probably be done if you work hard enough but if your time is worth anything to you, it’ll be more profitable in the long run if you hire some professionals. Otherwise, you’ve got a million hours on a house that is built out of matchsticks.

8

Good goddamn, boy, that is some cold water! To the bone!

I’ll say this much: there is SO much pornography on the internet, SO many ways to find absolutely free content to masturbate to, that in order to make money off of a website like this, I think the best bet is to aim it at a really narrow niche market. People are not likely to pay to see 12 amateur models on your website when there are nine billion websites out there with nine billion amateur models that cost nothing. But - if you cater to some specific sexual fetish, you are more likely to get paying customers. It all depends on what your models are willing to do.

9

Amateurs + ? = Profit!

10

So . . . what you’re saying is . . . don’t attempt to start with what you can afford, and try to build it as you go? Do not start unless you have $50,000 startup money? If you can’t begin at the top, don’t even bother?

11

Dude, trust me, this idea you suggest is not new to me. Done, and done. Frankly, with the niche-ness of my site, and the contacts I’ve made with related nichey sites–I already have banner-trade commitments from a number of very successful sites–I feel enormously confident that the red-ink-to-black-ink curve of this venture is going to be relatively steep.

On the plus side, despite Zipper’s advice, my outlay of red ink is going to be almost nil, so even if the curve is more gradual, I haven’t mortgaged my life. I’ve spent less than $1,000 on this, and we’ll see what happens.

12

In that case, I say go for it. Seriously, you should never hold yourself back from pursuing something just because someone says it might fail. Everything might fail. If you are targeting a niche audience, that is a major plus.

Believe me, when I want porn I usually know where to get it for free - but there are some things that I have shelled out money for because I couldn’t find them anywhere else. Never underestimate the free-spending ways of men who are led around by their John Thomas.

13

–and as far as the “People are not likely to pay to see 12 amateur models on your website when there are nine billion websites out there with nine billion amateur models that cost nothing” argument, think about it. Do the math.

The fact that there is SO MUCH free porn out there is exactly what is so encouraging. Math: despite the market being FLOODED with free product, internet porn is STILL a multi-billion dollar industry. “People” do, in fact, pay for internet porn; the glut of free junk out there doesn’t put a dent in the industry.

My first plan? “Leak” some pictures, logo attached, to as many of the free sources as I can think of. I know, myself, that when I see some porn that is especially appealing to me, the first think I do is backtrack to its source. And, yes, I have paid for porn that I’ve discovered by browsing the free stuff. Surely I’m not the only one who’s done this.

(It’s funny; I never dreamed in a million years that the consensus “advice” that would result from this query would be “DON’T DO IT!”)

14

Thanks, Argent. Needless to say, I’ll report back here as things progress.

15

Please don’t take that personally. I don’t believe anyone is trying to rain on your parade, but just offering cautious words of advice from personal experience.

On the upside, I did once interview with the owner of a VERY profitable Gay website. Although I didn’t get the job, it was very enlightening to see the huge amount of effort and money that had gone into making this site. I was being offered a rather small job in the grand scheme of things, and he was still offering a yearly salary of $75,000 - so he must be raking in the money. He had 10 people working full time on his website - plus he had three people filming new product, several more editing it, another team searching locations and casting models and he had multiple teams in two different cities. He also had a full time accountant and a lawyer on staff. BTW, this guy was about 30-35 years old. He was totally stressed out, as there is another website that is his major competitor and he was struggling to keep up.

Nobody is saying it can’t be done and can’t be profitable. Just letting you know that it can cost a lot to make a lot, and there is quite a bit of behind the scenes work that requires major commitment.

16

If you’re serious about this, please spend a weekend (or two) learning the joys of Django. Sure, some may say Rails, or CakePHP, but Django is the way to go.

[ul]
[li]Third party applications take care of many common design problems[/li][li]Comes with it’s own authentication/admin site right out of the box[/li][li]Makes building/maintaining databases ridiculously easy[/li][/ul]

It is hard as fuck to get started, but in two months, I’ve built a state of the art, bleeding edge of technology website that I couldn’t even comprehend in about 7 months of agonizing PHP/MySql work. For instance, there’s this application called “Django Photologue” that’s a pre-built photo-uploading application. With about 5 lines of code, you instantly have the ability to predefine sizes (gallery thumbnail, or whatever), predefine styles (make all images on the index page black and white, something like that), and voila, instant scalable web photo gallery.

Django also has forums, event calendars, pretty much anything you’d ever want. With some customization, it’s beautiful what you can built with such little code.

17

Thanks, forwarded to my web guy. He’s eager to build his skills and knowledge base, so I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.

18

Another piece of advice - people will be more willing to pay for HUGE photos. I mean, super-high-resolution ones where you can see the little tiny bumps on the woman’s skin. There are lots and lots of free images out there, but the downside is that most of them are relatively small.

Abby from Abby Winters used to post here. Abby Winters is one of the only porn sites I’ve ever paid for - about a year ago, while my girlfriend was away for a few weeks and I really needed some good porn - and the reason why is twofold. One, all of the girls on the site looked like normal everyday girls and not models, and two, all of the images were HUGE. Another plus was that all the girls were photographed in very candid settings, usually their own homes, and not on a professional set. I really liked that and I suspect a lot of other people do also because that website is very successful.

Also, in every set, for every girl, there were about 300 images, showing every conceivable angle and position, as well as the girl fully clothed and then very gradually getting completely undressed (something that I like a lot.) You can never have too many images in a set.

19

Argent: Check, check, check, check, and check. Cept it’s dudes.

20

Adult websites are the easiest business in the world to setup. I sort of wish I had the gumption to do it myself.