So you’re thinking about working in porn but you don’t know how to get started? We’re here to help. In this first offering of the “Your First Website” series, we’ll take a look at the first steps in designing any adult website… planning.Greetings all you would-be webmasters, and welcome to “Your First Website.” You are now reading the first offering in a series of articles designed to guide the brand new webmaster through the process of creating his or her first adult website. We’ll take a look at the various decisions a webmaster will face when designing a site, and we’ll do it in a step-by-step style that’s easy to follow. So if you’ve never built an adult website before – welcome, you’re in the right place. If you have built an adult website before, then maybe you can still find a few nuggets of information that will help you build an even better website next time out. So spit out your gum, take your seat, and no talking out of turn in my class! Today we’ll work on website planning – after all, any good architect will always start by drawing up plans.

The first thing you’ll want to consider – how will your website make money? Chances are if you’re building an adult website you aren’t planning on paying hosting bills and content license fees out of some kind desire to provide the people of the world with free pictures. No, you want to make a little cash. Maybe you want to make enough to cover the cost of all the beer you drink on the weekends, or maybe you want to build an online empire that will cover the rent. Either way, you’ll need to have a plan. How will you talk those who visit your site into breaking out the plastic card in their wallet? In other words, will you build a free site that pushes sponsors, an AVS site, a membership site or a combination site?

Making Money
Membership sites are complicated, and require more of a financial investment than you should spend on your first site. Free sites might be the way to go, but offering porn in an environment that has not been screened by some sort of age verification system is both risky and irresponsible. No, for this first site we’ll build an “AVS” site. AVS stands for Age Verification System. Surfers who visit an AVS site are usually first shown a brief, censored glimpse at the nature of the content found on the “inside” of the site, but the surfer must then pass through an age verification screen before he or she is allowed to access the inside. If the surfer has verified his or her age with the AVS company you choose to protect your site’s content, then that surfer gets into your site for free. You make nothing. If that surfer has not yet verified his or her age with your AVS company, and chooses to do so in order to gain access to your site, then you get paid a commission by the AVS company. Pretty sweet deal. Want to learn more about AVS sites? Check here:

http://www.theadultwebmaster.com/newbiecorner/avs.phtml

So right off the bat we’ll choose an AVS company to help keep minors away from our adult content, and to help us make some cash. You might want to take a look at Yahoo’s AVS category, they have most of the major players listed. Here’s that link:

Yahoo AVS Listings

Each AVS company has different terms, different pros, different cons and different payouts. If you don’t already know of an AVS you’re comfortable with, take the time to visit several different AVS websites and find a company that suits you. Consider how much they are offering to pay you, how many other sites they are protecting, and how likely they will be to convert sales. An AVS that protects 12,000 sites might be an easier sell than one that protects only 1,000 sites… after all, when someone buys a password through your AVS site they also gain access to every other site protected by that system. Some AVS systems will charge your surfer a fee for his or her password, and others are “free” so long as the user agrees to sign up for a week trial with a major paysite. The “free” AVS systems usually convert better, but they also pay less. For the purpose of this workshop we’ll choose the Adult Check AVS simply for the reason that they are the largest AVS and the best known.

How About a Theme?
So now you have a revenue plan and an AVS picked out, but do you have a theme for your site? Picking a generic theme like “sex pictures” or “naked girls” will make your sales job very difficult. You’ll want to pick a theme that’s more defined and go for that niche – after all, your little AVS site will have no luck competing with big paysites that offer a little of everything. No, you’ll want to use the one advantage you have over paysites – a narrow focus. Bondage, voyeurism, hair color, body size, sexual acts – these all make good themes for niche sites. Ethnicity also makes an excellent theme, and since I’ve always had a weakness for Japanese girls, we’ll choose that theme for your first site. “Japanese girls” as a theme is slightly more effective than simply offering “Asian girls,” but I think we can do even better. There are plenty of signs which suggest that surfers looking for “Japanese girls” are often looking for “barely legal Japanese girls.” The evidence is the immense popularity of Japanese “schoolgirls” and Japanese animation which depicts younger girls almost exclusively. So you’re not likely to do very well if your site is offering “Japanese girls over 60,” yet at the same time you want to make it clear that your site will be offering only pictures of “legal” models over the age of 18. You can get away with the use of the word “teen” if you are careful in your site’s wording (make sure you specify that the girls at 18+), but an even safer method for suggesting “young,” “schoolgirl,” and “legal” all at the same time would be to use the “college girls” or “coeds” theme. We’ll use that theme for your site.

The final step for this first lesson will be the selection of a domain name. Remember, domain names take a few days to actually start working once registered, so it’s always a good idea to register your name early in the process. You might consider DirectNIC.com when registering your domain name – they’re cheaper than most other domain name registration services, and their web site is very easy to use.

“Most search engines can’t distinguish between the various words in a domain name such as japanesecollegegirls.com, so you get no rankings boost off your domain name when someone searches for “Japanese college girls.” If you use hyphens to separate the words, such as japanese-college-girls.com, then the search engines will be able to read the individual words and your ranking will probably be higher. “

So right away we hop over to DirectNIC.com and see what’s available. Japanesecoeds.com would be an ideal domain name, so we type that into their search tool and see if it’s available. It’s taken. Of course. Another way to say “coeds” is “college girls,” and while it’s a bit longer, we next try japanesecollegegirls.com. Wow, it’s free? That’s our domain name. Don’t bother rushing off to register it, I just nabbed it. Now normally you won’t find a domain name like japanesecollegegirls.com, so when no good dot com name is available without hyphens, I recommend using the hyphen technique. For example, japanese-coeds.com is currently available, as is japanese-college-girls.com and many other hyphenated names. The advantage of the hyphen is in the search engine rankings. Most search engines can’t distinguish between the various words in a domain name such as japanesecollegegirls.com, so you get no rankings boost off your domain name when someone searches for “japanese college girls.” If you use hyphens to separate the words, such as japanese-college-girls.com, then the search engines will be able to read the individual words, and your ranking will probably be higher. The disadvantage to the hyphen comes when surfers try to remember your site. Often they will omit the hyphens and go to your competition. So in this case, if you rush off and register japanese-college-girls.com and build a great site, I’ll get some of your traffic when surfers forget the hyphens, because I have japanesecollegegirls.com… see the problem? Usually this isn’t a big problem, since not many people will bother to remember a simple AVS site. Usually the extra traffic you get from the search engines will more than make up for the loss of several fools who couldn’t remember your hyphens.

So let’s summarize what we’ve come up with so far. We have decided to build an adult website that uses the Adult Check AVS for its source of revenue. The theme of the site will be “Japanese college girls,” and we’ve registered the domain name “japanesecollegegirls.com” for use on the site. In Part II we’ll take a look at website hosting options, obtaining “content” for your site, and picking your HTML design software. For Part III, we’ll actually build the site. Then finally in Part IV we’ll market that sucker! Right now, however… class dismissed.

Connor Young is Editor-on-Chief of The ADULTWEBMASTER Magazine and currently lives in California where he also operates the CyberSultan.com adult search engine.