“Try specializing in a specific area instead of generalizing in everything”

Could be 1 of the most important parts i know can be a life saver trying to go for everything is something i have tried to do allot of the time.

Hey if you choose to try everything you make more money right ?

As i have learned thats far further from the truth than you think i enjoyed this article and i did read it in 1 big sit in ;)

Sincerely,
Richard Metcalfe

Thanks for pointing this out for me

D.

Awesome article and great read. I don’t feel Twodded was a Flop in anyway it’s still going strong with the few staff very dedicated to it.

Just like to comment on a few things you have covered, one being the ads. I never noticed the ads on Twodded even though I know they are there they were practically invisable in the tutorials. The only thing that irks me on the Twodded Tutorials is they are spread on several pages that I see a lot of webmasters are now doing just adding a little bit of text spread to 10 pages or so, not only hard to read but very confusing to the reader trying to follow and NO PRINT function available for the reader.

If I come across an awesome tutorial I’ll print it for future reference.

Last being getting affiliated or a partnership resource with the Software Company your writing tutorials on, highly agree and is very easy to obtain as I have done this myself.

Anyways thanks for the read I enjoyed it with my morning coffee :P

Regards
Donna

I’m just going to keep it simple. Great article, i like how personalised it was helped to apply it to your own life and situations. Well written :).

There is one point I would like to add onto (actually, probably a few contributions I would like to make to your article, and probably will on Bloggett in the near future), and that would be being prepared for troublemakers.

If there is one thing that can get frustrating, depressing, and really destroy a high quality website, it could possibly be the “bad guys” reading your articles. Between hackers, competitors, and just unfriendly people, your site can earn a bad reputation for both publishers who write articles for you, and for the readers who expect friendly, and useful comments from the community (if you have one).

The top priority in any case would be to make sure that your commenting system is secure. Letting a low-life hacker destroying your article a few days after it is published will throw off traffic, and render your site to users looking for that article as not a dependable resource. It would be even worse if you had a publisher write the article for you, and then having the article vanish. Writers do not like to see their hard work go to waste; it is always important to give them praise and rewards for their writing.

Second off, watch out for spam. If you require your viewers to register prior to commenting, you may find it much easier to control spam pretty easily (except for those who simply have nothing better to do than register, and leave an ugly remark, or a link to their viagra website). As you said, keeping a team of people to handle this will certainly make things easier.

I have also found another method that does not require user registration, but also never lets any spam get viewed by the public. If you censor comments for approval before they are displayed, you will never have to worry about a viewer or robot spamming your comment system. However, censorship online can be a big turnoff to some, so I would recommend using this as a last resort (personal experience).

Again, excellent article! I look forward to more from you in the future!

Twodded didn’t worked out very well not because of you not writing tutorials, everybody involved on Twodded knew that you were quite busy doing stuff for P2LStudios and also a lot of other jobs that you were doing apart from college, which for sure costs you a lot of time. The problem finding people which are able to write tutorials constantly and also do their normal work doesn’t matter if college or “real” work is a very hard task, and there are not many people willed to give their knowledge to everyone without getting anything back.

Twodded had/has a lot of talented people which could write great stuff if the would just plan their projects a little bit better.

Anyway, I would like to point out that the Twodded project isn’t completely dead and I’m pretty sure that it will have somewhere in the near future a promising outcome, which will attract professional as also amateur tutorial writers to an outstanding high-quality platform of knowledge.

Regarding advertisement on Twodded, I never cared really about the ads on it, since they were so apart from the tutorial that I really merely throw an eye on them, but they were there, I don’t need to mention how many site I’ve found where ads were all over the place, a thing that really scares me out of that site, I want to learn something and not mix up my code with any “free blog” or “get cheap software” ads.

Now I know why some of the tutorials I followed never worked out ;)

15/10 for this outstanding article, I hope it opens the eyes of all the people that want to start or already have a tutorial site running. Very interested on reading further comments on this post :)

Thanks again for letting me be a part of this awesome project which gave me the chance to share my work / projects with an awesome community! …the show must go on…

I’ll pick out two points to direct my reply at:
- Me leading by example, but not doing so
- Tiago pumping out tutorials with a full time job

I think possible ‘flop’ of Twodded might have been because of it being a victim of my bad management on a whole. But more than likely because of destraction by clients and the distraction of Pixel2life itself. It brings me to realise the need to mention ‘you have to have the time to run the site’ in the next article, so thanks for that :)

Tiago did manage to pull out almost 20 tutorials, AND answer all user comments/questions on his tutorial with a full-time job going AND client work on top of this. He’s outstanding, and I could probably sit here all day praising him :)

You seem to have touched on alot of points which are overlooked in many of the ‘wannabe’ tutorial index sites springing up all over the place. Hopfully your ‘failure’ (by your own standards anyways) with Twodded will help some smaller sites out.

I think in some places you have stated the obvious, and although I use the word ‘obvious’, this still somehow appears oblivious to many. The amount of so-called tutorial sites I have seen which lack many of the things you have bought up in this article are just astounding. Just one example of this, was visiting a website which has tutorial on several categories, and three of the seven categories on this site did not have any tutorials in them. I suppose this is also another point you might have mentioned in the article, being that if you have a category – have content for it! There is nothing more annoying for me personally, to click on a link and have that good old ‘nothing to see here folks, move on’ message staring me in the face!

Your point about advertisements also caught my attention. I have never actually noticed that you placed the advertisments on Twodded above and below the actual tutorial content, but I have noticed the advertisments added in between tutorials on other sites. Although this may appear bad for you, it was certainly more helpful to me as a user, and I think you have pretty much hit the nail on the head with regards to that decision.

Another point which I found interesting was to keep your writers motivated. The one thing you did not touch on, is that things like financial rewards, and links to sites, will generally go a long way into convincing writers to actually write for you. As someone who actually wrote a couple of tutorials for Twodded myself, I can honestly say at times it was hard to motivate myself to write them (lets make that 90% of the time shall we). Now if you chuck in £50 per tutorial from Ad revenue, you might have seen a different (and much better) result!

About leading by example – I think I have had a few discussion with yourself about writing tutorials, and i’m yet to see it happen. Without criticising you – as I know some people simply do not have the time – I think that could have gone a very long way into setting the standards. It really is a great point to make for any tutorial website owner out there, that if you want your tutorials to be top drawer, then set the standards your self. It’s no good sitting back and letting other people do the work and get you the traffic, as in the previous point, what is keeping them motivated? You need to set yourself apart, and with the usual PHP Includes tutorials you will not do that.

I can’t quite bring myself to leave a comment here and not mention how you have singled out Tiago in this one either. I think if there is anything you, and others, should take from Twodded, is that there are certainly people out there who are more than willing to put the time and effort in there. Although he has a full-time job which he works crazy hours for, he still managed to whip out around 20 tutorials, which is about 15 more than anyone else!

Anyways, all in all, feking great article Jay. Really enjoyed reading (and commenting) it. 10/10 and looking forward to the second part. Please correct me if I have missed any of your point whilst reading and commenting on this, for I am slightly intoxicated.

-Stu