Being an adult webmaster is more than simply screwing around on the computer
(although your friends may tell you differently). This is a business, and you're
skilled tradesman. As such, you'll need to have a toolbox filled with things
that will help save you time and make your job easier.

Shortcuts On Your Homepage

What is your homepage currently set to? Can you get to every important site you
visit daily from this page? Can you find all of your sponsor logins and
passwords with one click from this homepage? Can you leave yourself notes?

If not, you need to build your own homepage directly on your hard drive.

Simply make a folder on your drive somewhere (name it homepage) and drop an
index.html file into it. This index file doesn't have to be fancy - only you are
going to see it unless you network it across your home LAN - but be sure to fill
it with invaluable links:

• Links to all of the message boards you visit frequently
  
  
• A javascript
  
  To-Do list for notes, important dates, or reminders
  
  (note: this uses cookies, so if you delete your cookies you'll lose your
  list!)
  
  
• Links to all of your own sites, galleries, and stats for your domains
  
  
• Links to your sponsors (with logins and passwords)
  
  
• Links to the radio shows you listen to (or the calendar at All Of 'Em)
  
  
• Anything you find incredibly useful, such as good tutorials
  
  
• You may also want to put some 'incentive' on this page, such as a picture
  of a house you want to have one day or something you're going to reward
  yourself with when you reach your first goal, or some nice energizing quotes
  
  
• Other sites you visit frequently, such as eBay or a news site.
  
  
• Your site-building tools (more on this in a moment)
  

It's best if you split these links up into separate pages, else the homepage
would become incredibly long. By dropping other files into your homepage folder
you can make your own website directly on your hard drive and have everything at
your fingertips within two clicks. This homepage will become the lid to your
toolbox, and you link to the other pages from the index.html file.

sponsors.html

This file will have a table with direct links to your sponsors' login pages
(open them in a new window), all of your logins, passwords, and any extra info
such as a description of what the sponsor is or an additional ID (such as
CCBill's revshare ID).

You could also expand this further by making a file for each sponsor that shows
all of your linking codes for their sites (include the name of the site and what
niche it is), and simply linking to each sponsor's individual page from
sponsors.html. Now you don't have to visit the sponsor's site and login to get
linking codes, you can simply whip open each sponsor's page and copy the link
directly off of your hard drive.

For even more convenience, you can make individual pages showing each sponsor's
banners (organized by site name) and the linking codes for these banners. Link
to the image that is on your domain (you should have one central folder for all
of your sponsors' banners on one domain). Again, just grab and go.

sites.html

It is essential that you keep track of your sites and galleries. Each time you
make a site or gallery, drop a link to it in this file. You could also simply
make this your 'hub' page and upload it whenever there's a change - that way
you'll be sure the spiders will find all of your sites. Don't bother linking to
the thousands of mirrors you make for each site or gallery, just link to the
clean version or the FPA lead-in to the site.

contacts.html

Here you'll drop in names, phone numbers, ICQ numbers etc. of the people you
network with (and of course friends and family). Once again you could use a
javascript address book to do this but a simple table will do. No more hunting
for numbers or losing your ICQ contacts after a crash!

expenses.html

If you're not using a program such as Excel or Quickbooks to keep track of your
expenses and income (which you should be!), making a nice printable table of all
incoming and outgoing business monies will help you tremendously at tax time. It
doesn't have to be complex. The date, whether it was an expense or a paycheck,
the company it was from/to, what it was for, and receipt or check number will
suffice.

Site Building Tools

For these tools it is best if you make a folder inside of the homepage folder
(for organization), then either link directly to the folder itself or link to
the pages within the folder.

metatags.html

One page with meta keywords and descriptions for every niche you build sites
for. Each time you do a new niche, add the keywords into this page. You'll want
to do this in an editor so that when you open the page up in your browser the
meta tags won't be hidden, and you can simply copy/paste them into the new site
you're building.

recips.html

Make tables of recips that you can simply copy and paste into each page. Be sure
to give each recip group a pagename, so that all of your sites will have the
same mirrored pages. For example, a recip table starting with Tommy's Bookmarks
in the first cell could specify a mirrored page named bookmarks.html. This will
make it easier to find something and change it if need be. If you want to get
fancy, you can break this up into specific recip lists such as
freesiterecips.html, avsrecips.html, tgprecips.html etc. Don't forget to add
your own hub or link list into each recip table!

submit.html

This page will have direct links to the submission page of each site on your
recip tables. Be sure to group the submit links together, matching them with the
recip tables. Put a little form checkbox next to each submit link so that you
can check it off when you're done submitting there. For example, if your recip
table only had Tommy's, Green Guy, and Smut Gremlins; and these recips went on
bookmarks.html, that section of the submit list would look like this:

bookmarks.html

Tommy's Bookmarks




Green Guy



Smut Gremlins

Don't forget to drop in submit links to Dmoz, your own link list, and all of
your favorite search engines. Also make sure you open each submit page in a new
window.

One thing that I find handy on this page is to put some form textareas into the
right-hand side of the page. When I'm done building a site, I can open up
submit.html, drop the site's URL and details into the textarea, save the page
and go build my next site. When I'm done building I can simply pull up
submit.html in my browser and there will be all of the site details that I need
to submit for easy copying/pasting.

pagecolors.html

This one is pretty simple - body tags (and perhaps style tags) for each color
combination that you use frequently. Rather than typing them in by hand or
finding a site you've already built with these codes, you can simply grab them
from this page and paste into your new site.

Templates

For easy organization it's best if all of your templates are put into a separate
folder, but it's not absolutely necessary. Here you'll have a copy of each
template you've ever made so you don't need to go hunting for it again. Give
each template a name - tgp10pics3rows2ads.html, tgp15picsLstyle.html,
freesitewarning.html, etc. - and when you're building a new site you can simply
open up the template you want, grab the code and go. Make sure you don't put
bgcolor/text/link color tags into these templates; just grab the appropriate
combination code from pagecolors and paste it in.

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