A couple of things I’ve learn’t from creating my own site.

Plan the site first

Even though the site is your own, make sure you plan the site before hand. That means putting pen to paper BEFORE fingers to keyboard.

Pretend your a client, create a plan with sitemaps, deliverables, mockups etc. Not doing so means your own project can experience a lot of scope creep. This happened to me with the design of the site. Constantly changing the look and feel is like riding an exercise bike, you might look better after hours on it, but you haven’t actually moved anywhere.

Development environment

This is a bit harder, but try and get your development environment working the same as the live one. My hosting is on a unix box, but my development is under Windows.

Different environments mean your pathing, and is particular include directives may not work. Also another bugbear was mod_rewrite, make sure your slashes are in the right place.

Either use a windows hosting environment, or maybe setup linux on a spare computer / usb drive (I might be looking into linux on a usb drive later).

It’s all a bit harder then the nice cosy development environment at work.

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