Hi David
Good start. Questions I'd ask are:
How do you prepare the pages - if you're using something like Dreamweaver its worth taking some time to set up the various tags (p, a, img, h1, ...) in a CSS stylesheet. It'll help you a lot with consistency of appearance and as you change your mind (and you will!!!) you can ring the changes instantly and consistently throughout your site. It's a lesson I'm still learning the hard way on mine.
Do you really need the advertising? Appreciate it drives revenue, but is the amount of revenue its generating worth the impact appearance wise its having on your site.
If you want the site to generate revenue, check out some of the Affiliate programmes that are relevant and then do hard links to those instead. As an example, check out my
www.cyprusandmore.com site. Nothing to do with railways, but it sells books through Amazon and earns me some revenue.
Next point is to get more personal stuff into it. Check out adding a Wordpress blog. Costs you nothing, but gives you a platform to rant and rave to your heart's content!
Final point is to measure how many hits you're getting. If you use something like Statcounter (again its free) you can track numbers of visitors to your site and where they went. With time and patience you can see what people like and then serve them up more of it.
Hope this helps, happy to go deeper on any of the subjects you're interested in.
Best
Mike
http://www.mikemccormac.co.uk
