It’s important for me to state that not ALL designers are con artists who love running up the tab on you. However, if you do not know what you are doing or too lazy to learn you are going to run into problems. I will give you a prime example of this.

I am working on this huge network of sites for not only ad spots to add into my existing network, but also adding in link trades and some other things for tracking and what not. As you might imagine, building 30 sites in 30 days is a hefty task and can be costly to boot. For this project I already had a site that was done some time back that fit the mold for what I wanted in this first batch of sites.

It would be running on a centralized server script where I can have one central DB/admin panel with 10,000+ sponsor galleries but I can have 100 different sites pulling from this single DB daily. I would set up each new site with different domian, colors, header, and parameters to pull from on the DB so that no two of the 100 sites would have the exact same content.  I would also set up my link organizer on each new site as well. So I would, again, have one centralized link management admin panel to handle my entire network of links. I figured I can do one of these per day.

The part is can get tricky with is design work. Most would look at this project, and think they need a whole new design for each site. Even though you are looking to use the same type of look and template for all sites as you launch them. You throw out some posts looking for bids and they come in from $50.00 Russians, to your main guys saying they can do it for $100/250.00 a pop.

While these are fair prices more a less for a NEW DESIGN you really do not need one. After all, you are simply changing up a free graphics and some headers for the most part. Although some designers will tell you that you need a new design. Not so if you have a demo site with a working CSS and some basic HTML skill.

Now, before you try this yourself. You need to make sure you do a complete copy of any code on your site, and save it in a text file. That way, should you fuck something up you can easily cut and paste the original back in there. You should ALWAYS do this if you do not know what you are doing, and are trying to do something yourself. Otherwise, you could screw up your site and not know the steps to back track in your code.

Ok, so you would want to open up your CSS/HTML on your site to see if you can make some basic changes like a background. I take a peek at my main demo example site, and….

On this example, you can easily see where the background color to the site and style sheet (CSS) is controlled by the HTML. I can easily switch this up myself by finding color codes and replacing it for each new site. You can find color codes by doing a quick Google search.

“html color codes”

You find a color you like, replace the color in the “CODEHERE” in between the ” and save. This should change the color of whatever you are doing in that HTML code. So in this case, it changes the background color from a light blue to purple.

So now you ask, WIIFM (what’s in it for me”? Well, this little trick just saves you a lot of time and money. Instead of $250.00 for a new design per site and 1-5 days to cut and install it each time (assuming that is what thye would do) you now can change it yourself, and only need a designer for the header graphic and some minor other graphics that should be around $10-50.00 per site. Depending on what you need.

Sometimes it PAYS to learn these little HTML and other tricks to save yourself time and money.