As a quick hack-day project, I decided to spin up a quick fake real news website. It was pretty fun making the layout, logo, and color scheme. I actually really like the image-less style I went with, since uploading high-res featured images for every post can be a huge pain sometimes.
What’s hard for me is realizing I’m not a writer. Writing is very easy to get wrong and have sound too cheesy or as if you’re trying too hard. It’s tricky to get tone down. Sometimes it’s easier to play a character when you write. On WOW, Real News! I just pretend I’m not one dude writing fake news satire, I’m pretending like I’m a cocky, established media company.
The site has actually been performing decently well for it’s 3rd day of life– already up to 700+ views! In reality, of course, that’s nothing. I want a billion views, and at 700 views, if you round down, that’s zero billion views.
What’s been hard was converting readers into subscribers. The response has been mostly good– no one seems to hate it, and a few people seem to love it, but still, no subscribers. I’m not one to beg for subscribers, so the most I’ll ever do is the least intrusive slide-in box at the bottom.
If the site ever gets popular enough, I’ll definitely put more time/effort/money into it.
As per technical, I got this site fully up and running, from idea to functioning website, in about 5 hours. 1 hour spent setting up EC2 WordPress Instance, 30 minutes setting up domain stuff, 1 hour on the logo and icon, and 2.5 hours on the style/theme/layout of the website. I did a ton of dirty CSS hacks, but hey, I was just trying to make a quick joke anyway, and I ended up falling in love with it.
I got a chuckle out of myself: my site here, robolab.io actually helped me out a bunch. I referred to a few of my own tips that I’ve posted on the site while working on Wow, Real News!
Well, that’s it, if anyone’s interested in more details about anything I wrote about here, let me know.
