Dream it: Build It: Grow It – With the Microsoft Web Platform
The Internet and the Web are hardly new, but, with the rapid change and rapid innovation that is happening almost daily, knowing how easy, or how hard it is to get content on the web is a constantly moving target.
So, I’m starting this series of blog posts – on the theme of Dream It / Build It / Grow It, to look at what is involved in taking your idea (Dream), and putting it on the Web (Build), in a way that you can bring it to the world, and hopefully make a business out of it (Grow).
To try and do something a little different, and a little fun, I wanted to come up with a real-world scenario for a product that just about anybody could put together, and come up with scenarios for how they can use the web to drive awareness of their product, and grow their business as a result, hopefully profitably!
So, following the unwritten rule of only doing what you are familiar with, I came up with the scenario of writing a book. It’s the dream of many people, be they writers or not, to have thier work published for the whole world to see. Usually the dream is that a publishing house will send them a contract, and the dollars will walk in the door. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy!
But technology is changing the game every day, so, on the theme of Dream It, let’s work with that. You may have written the next great tech book that shows how architecture should be done, or you may have written a great Science Fiction novel that will change the game as we know it, or you might have written a collection of funny anecdotes about your mother-in-law. Whatever it is, it’s a dream, and this series of articles is all about helping you use the Web, and the Microsoft Web Platform in particular in realizing that dream.
Take a look at the following site:
Over the coming weeks, you’ll look into how this site was built from the ground up, and how you can do something similar where you can publish your work, market it, grow it and earn from it.
Of course, the principles aren’t limited to publishing written work like this – they could apply to any product or service that you want to market or sell.
In the next post, we’ll look at the very basics – getting a domain name, getting some space on the web, mapping the domain to the space, and putting your very first page on it.
Enjoy the ride!