How long does it take you to make a FS?

[tigermom]

Takes me about 2-3 hours in total, considering everything from choosing the site to promote, doing the design, text and everything. When I started out, someone told me it should only take 1 hour to make a FS, but I don't know, tends to take me a whole lot longer...

[Fonz]

Making a freesite takes me about 1.5-2 hours. Submitting it to the 36 LL's I submit to now takes me another 40 minutes, don't ask me why it takes so long but it just does

[Sexvilly]

my record is 3 hours, I can't make it less. all depends how fancy you want your freesite look like, do you watch how good every link stands out, match one link to another, bottom describe what mentioned on top. do you use tables, find right colors, spend time searching for the right keyword combination for title, etc. many factors.

submitting takes me 45 mins minimum, 118 link-lists manually.

[Surfn]

When I make a fs it takes me about an hour. Then a few additional mins to submit.

[krusher]

I was thinking about the same thing, and figured that once you created some fs's (around 30) you could use them as templates for future galleries which would cut the time considerably. Other than that it is pretty much switching images, banners, text, color, and submitting. Am I thinking too far off here?

[Useless]

Originally Posted by tigermom

When I started out, someone told me it should only take 1 hour to make a FS, but I don't know, tends to take me a whole lot longer...

Well, if you're building plain old blah-blah shit sites, then an hour is about right. I've seen a couple of your sites on the board, I think, and, as I recall, you shoot for a more refined design. I also know that you are an SE person, so those elements are going to add to your build time as well. If you're quality-conscious, you have to expect your endeavers to require more time. When I started, it took me literally all day to build and submit a single site. I eventually knocked that down a couple of hours, but my sites, I must confess, were still not as nice as yours or many other builders out there. I still build free sites for others, on occasion, and the time it takes me to create a single non-graphic HTML template is still all over the place.

[Lemmy]

Depending on my level of inspiration, how much I recycle from other freesites, how many trips to the bathroom, trips to the kitchen to re-heat my coffee, cats that need petting etc. etc. and any number of unavoidable urgent distractions that require my immediate attention, I'd say anywhere from 1 hr to the whole day.

[ponygirl]

Originally Posted by Lemmy

Depending on my level of inspiration, how much I recycle from other freesites, how many trips to the bathroom, trips to the kitchen to re-heat my coffee, cats that need petting etc. etc. and any number of unavoidable urgent distractions that require my immediate attention, I'd say anywhere from 1 hr to the whole day.

LOL - yep, that's about right.

I build from the pictures up so I generally don't use templates, although I will use the same design concepts. If I end up doing a graphical title or something then it takes longer. Plus if you have to do a lot of work with the pics, etc etc...it's so hard to give a definitive time frame to build a good freesite.

Ponygirl

[ladydesigner]

With 4 kids under 8, one cat and a husband, it takes me all day to build & submit a free site. I used to be able to do it in a few hours but now I have to stop/start what I'm doing so much that I seem to never get stuff done. Plus I don't like using templates so most of my sites are built from scratch.

[ponygirl]

Originally Posted by ladydesigner

With 4 kids under 8, one cat and a husband, it takes me all day to build & submit a free site.

holy crow - I'll give you a medal just for geting up in the morning, never mind getting freesites built

Ponygirl

[picXX]

I use pretty much ~3 hrs. to build a freesite, that is, when the galleries are allready built.
If i should build a freesite from the bottom up, with galleries, mainsite and the index i would say 4-5 hrs.
I am using too much time to custom build banners and buttons, and way too long on the texts, but i would say it is better to build one good site and get accepted , than to build 5 and get rejected at most places

[tigermom]

Interesting replies... I have been having this discussion with another submitter on ICQ. He's putting far less time into his FS, working with a few plain templates and producing them quickly enough. Mine get accepted almost everywhere, most of the time. His less so. However... his are producing more sales and he says it's because their plain ugly, so go figure lol

ladydesigner, I hear you sister. Only two kids here (under 5), one hubby and 3 cats, but it sure teaches you how to work in spurts, doesn't it? my hubby says he could never work like that with so many interruptions around, but I tell him it's that extra X chromosome that lets us keep our focus for longer

[japamor]

Originally Posted by Lemmy

Depending on my level of inspiration, how much I recycle from other freesites, how many trips to the bathroom, trips to the kitchen to re-heat my coffee, cats that need petting etc. etc. and any number of unavoidable urgent distractions that require my immediate attention, I'd say anywhere from 1 hr to the whole day.

I think Lemmy's given the definitive answer!

I can take anything from 1 hour to days if I start daydreaming. Also I find changing to a new niche is very time-consuming as it requires changing all the recips.

[Ms Naughty]

This has been a reassuring thread. Procrastination is always a problem for me when it comes to free sites. And then I tend to build them from scratch half the time, just because that feels like a good thing to do. While I never managed to make the 30 templates, mine still tend to look a bit similar.

[murray]

15min including submitting and no these are not templates, just been doing for so many years its second nature.

[docholly]

Months.

or depending on how much i can coerce tart into making me a "pretty" but ugly template a day. the fastest I ever did was i think 4 hours but then again I hand pick my submits and try to mix them up with some long time LL and some newbie ones so everyone gets a little trickle of traffic and hopefully i get a HUGE surge!!

[Greenguy]

I used to be able to build & submit one in about 90 min or so.

But, I can build 5 in 2 hours, submit one & have 4 left over to submit every 30 or so days

[QuickDraw]

Sometimes if I've been working on freesites for a couple days straight I can slap a decent one out in about 2 hrs, but I tend to get burnt out on them really quickly and can usually only stand to make them a few days a month. Generally speaking though, 4-6 hrs, mostly because I get picky about stupid shit which holds me up.

[virgohippy]

I've been trying shorten my time. My mentor has been doin this for quite a while, and he can get one out in pretty short order.

Of course, he doesn't mess around with some of the things I experiment with, like attempting SEO, trying out new lists, keeping recip tables unique, adding as much unique text to new sites as possible, etc... but he sells better'n me, so... eh.

All told, 3-5 hours now, I think. But I think I can continue to shave off minutes here and there as I refine my technique.

[soggy]

Takes me around 4 hours. That is submitting and everything. I do alt tags, meta tags and make each site as eye catching as possible and very clean. Yeah, it takes me a while, but being as most LL only allow one submit a day I am fine by it.

Good topic BTW

[sue-fl]

Originally Posted by ladydesigner

With 4 kids under 8, one cat and a husband, it takes me all day to build & submit a free site. I used to be able to do it in a few hours but now I have to stop/start what I'm doing so much that I seem to never get stuff done. Plus I don't like using templates so most of my sites are built from scratch.

Wow 4 under 8, now that is a handful, oh the laundry must be mind blowing!

On freesites for me, about 2 hours on a good day, 3-5 days when I can't concentrate which is most of the time lately

[lorsha]

4 - 5 hours here. I know I make them nice & clean at least. Not sure how good otherwise, hehe.

Hubby and I will be shooting a crap load of content in the next couple of months, so will have a lot of new stuff to build around.

[MrYum]

Originally Posted by lorsha

4 - 5 hours here. I know I make them nice & clean at least. Not sure how good otherwise, hehe.

Hubby and I will be shooting a crap load of content in the next couple of months, so will have a lot of new stuff to build around.

Looking forward to seeing the new content

As to build times, I haven't done a free site in a while. But, used to take about 4 or 5 hours including submissions. The way I build free sites tends to take a bit longer as I mirror the entire site for each recip table, then change up the text on all the pages.

[QuickDraw]

Originally Posted by MrYum

Looking forward to seeing the new content

As to build times, I haven't done a free site in a while. But, used to take about 4 or 5 hours including submissions. The way I build free sites tends to take a bit longer as I mirror the entire site for each recip table, then change up the text on all the pages.

Do you find more of your pages indexed by se's using that method? I've thought about it in the past, but always figured it was more trouble then it was worth.. Do you use unique directory names too? I think I might give that a try on my next go 'round.

[virgohippy]

Originally Posted by QuickDraw

Do you find more of your pages indexed by se's using that method? I've thought about it in the past, but always figured it was more trouble then it was worth.. Do you use unique directory names too? I think I might give that a try on my next go 'round.

I like to change up text with mirrors too, when I have the time for it. Although, I've noticed that google and yahoo seem to favor unique title tags more than anything else when it comes to making variance on mirrors.

But it doesn't take too long to swap out a few choice words here and there, and tweak your file names. If you can say the exact same thing but use a different words to do it then it's still unique.