About SBI
Or How to Build a Website without Knowing Anything!
Where does this ‘About SBI’ page come into Grand Cayman Wanderer? It comes in as supporting information. It’s our story of how we got here and, maybe, how you could too.
The kids have gone so what do two fit and healthy people do when they’re abandoned by their children?
They get active, that’s what!
Go to the gym more often — and the theater. Travel more. Socialize more. More movies, more books, more everything! It’s great, only…
There was something missing. Some of those old dreams not quite ready to give up in a hedonistic never-neverland, not ready to go quietly into that long twilight. We still want to build something!
What about building a business?
May as well, we can’t yet retire from actual work. We’re too young to retire but not too young to be ‘preparing to retire’. When I do retire, and I want to go early, I want to hit the ground running. I want to be working as hard for me as I ever did for someone else, only it will what I want to do and it won’t be ‘work’, it will be fun.
One thing we really wanted to do was get back to traveling, like we did before kids, and another thing we can do is take photos of something other than kids’ sports. And we love taking photos so that’s two.
Then there’s my writing. I can do lots more of that and that’s where this site (and the others to come) and this page, about SBI, fits in.
I’ve been writing for years and people do publish my articles — but not nearly often enough!! So if I’m to do more writing, I need to be able to publish my own work. So that’s three things we can do. Now can we join writing, photos and travel into a future ‘career’?
I looked at ways of self-publishing. Book publishing is easy nowadays thanks to the web. Lulu.com, for example, is a great place to start. They even do photos.
But books aren’t articles. For articles, particularly travel articles, I needed a website and when we thought more about it, we realized we would need a number of websites for the new liberated future we were planning for ourselves.
We looked into building a website and found plenty of options. For example, our internet provider gives us free web space and even instructions on how to build a site, which is good because we hadn’t a clue how to do it. But it didn’t take me long to realize I didn’t know enough about the web to make this work. I needed someone to show me how to do everything!!
It turns out there are many people out there in cyberspace who will help. Some even provide free websites, ready built. All we had to do was populate a free site with some small part of ourselves and we’d be up and running. But that wasn’t what we wanted. We wanted it to be our work, not someone else’s work.
Then I investigated web building package providers, quite a few of them, and they all seemed to offer what we were looking for — the ability to custom build sites with our experiences. But which one do we choose?
Remember, we had no idea how to build a website and no idea how to attract people to the website even if we got one built. After all, the drive behind writing is to be read. A website with no visitors would be the self-publishing equivalent of those unpublished articles I mentioned earlier.
The folks who use SBI turned out to be a pretty passionate and convincing bunch so I dug deeper and found the SBI Action Guide and the Forums. Sounds dull, I know, but the fact is, for me to build a website was going to require lots of simple instructions and heaps of good advice.
We chose SBI and I’m really, really glad we did. Building the site was easy (and fun) and people visit (and read) our site! Lots of people!! Possibly as many readers in the past year as I had in the previous ten as a regular writer. And nobody gets to edit my work but me. Those of you who write will know what I mean!
Not only does SBI teach you how to build a site, in some ways that’s the easy bit. More importantly, they tell you how to select your site and how to position it so it gets noticed. They provide step-by-step instructions so people who have no idea (like me) can build a successful website and even make money at it.
And by the way, we do!
I’ve told you here why SBI was perfect for us, but it is also the solution for anyone who has a passion to share — it could be for you, this About SBI page could change your life as it has so many others. I know that sounds like sales talk — and I’m no salesman — but we can see where this is going for us. Here are examples of others:
Our two students could help out, of course, by building their own website to make money. It would certainly look better on their resume than most of the summer work they got.
Maybe you want to work from home and drop out of that commuting rat race. Don’t we all but we also need to earn a living! A regular check pays bills so it’s kind of needed for the simple things in life, like food and shelter.
Maybe you’re a stay-at-home Mom who wants to stay sane. Kids are great but adults need to express themselves as adults. Adults like to make money, not because they love money, but because earning money is society’s way of showing appreciation, of giving applause. And we all need applause, even the most shrinking of violets needs to be told they’re valued.
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'A wanderer on the face of the earth'
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre and also Dorothy L. Sayers, Five Red Herrings
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