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It’s Thursday.

The day before you start the Website In A Weekend eCourse.

That’s right. You’re going to build a website this weekend.

Scary?

Could be. Especially if you aren’t prepared.

You need this checklist before you get started with building your Website In A Weekend.

First up…

Take care of the critter

Creature comforts are important. If your body lacks fuel, your mind will not work as well as it needs to work to get through this weekend successfully.

• Food:

  I like to eat a big breakfast when I have a lot to do during the day. It helps give me energy for the whole day. With a big breakfast I don’t need to eat as much for lunch or supper either. What you eat is your business… if it were up to me… I’d make sure you had plenty of bacon and eggs!

  For lunch and dinner, plan on eating a little lighter than normal. Add more salad, take less heavy carbs: Pasta a no no.

  I like having a lot of fresh fruit on hand for snacking. Since I can walk to 99 Ranch, an enormous asian supermarket, I load up on cool stuff like dragon fruit, asian pears, kiwis, whatever else is in season. Ok, dragon fruit are really just pitaya, and from Mexico, but 99 Ranch is the only place I can get them, so I’ll call ‘em dragon fruit.

  More snacks: cheese, crackers, chips, dips… the usual. You have a lot to get done between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. If you need to fuel yourself on junk food for a couple of days, you have my permission.

• Drink:

  Water water water. You’re going to get dehydrated. Plan ahead to drink plenty.

  Stock up on fruit juice or sports drinks as well. These will help you stay hydrated and give you an energy boost.

• Coffee or tea:

  Actually, I drink both. Far too much most likely! In any case, if you partake of either (or both), make sure you have enough on hand to get through until at least Monday evening! You won’t have time to go to the store this weekend, so you need to make sure you have the start of your following week handled.

This bears repeating:

You won’t have time to shop, stock up tonight to get through until Tuesday!

Get your infosystems ready

Next, collect up all your information about account names and passwords so that you can get to them easily. You’re probably going to get a couple more accounts over the weekend.

• Gmail:

  First up, if you don’t have a gmail account, just go get one. Google provides some powerful and free tools that will help you learn about your blog traffic, where readers are coming from, where they’re going, and what they are doing while on your blog.

• WordPress.com:

  You will need a WordPress.com account to take advantage of tools such as Akismet for reducing comment spam, and for using statistics internally on your blog. You will also get a WordPress.com blog which you can use for blogging outside your niche.

• Social networking:

  If you have twitter or facebook accounts, we can hook them up to your new blog.

• Paper, pens and pencils:

  It’s highly likely you are going to acquire even more internet accounts for various services. You will need to handle user names and passwords.

  The fastest way to deal with user names and passwords is paper and pencil. A notebook would be just fine. You can transfer everything into a spreadsheet later.

Get a head start on your blog

If you have anything at all written that you want to post on your blog, find it and put it somewhere convenient, somewhere you can get to it fast. Like, cut and paste fast. This will save you huge amounts of time on Saturday when you are writing your pillar content during the afternoon doldrums.

Lacking articles to post, write out a few dozen titles for articles you would like to write. You will use these to create categories. Categories help you keep your writing focused, and help readers find more articles related to what they are interested in reading on your new blog.

Above all, prepare yourself to work really, really hard for two and half days. You’ll be glad you did.

Now that you’re ready… take the next step: Website In A Weekend: Friday Evening – Off to the Races.

Lagniappe

You know, after you rack your brains for every conceivable task, and you’re sure it’s covered every which way to Dallas, somebody pops up with the obvious…

Hat tip : Lori Franklin at Jane Be Nimble reminded me about Gravatars. Of course. A head smacker if there ever was one.

Read why you need a Gravatar in Who The Heck Are You? Get a Gravatar!, then head off to gravatar.com and make it happen.