For our main column, we wanted to keep it as wide as possible, because it seemed to facilitate reading. One of the main things that depends on the width of your main column is pictures. Blogs tend to have pictures around 320px by 240px. This tends to look a little small in a column where the main column is 640px.

You have to make a decision on whether you want to post pictures at the standard 320px width, so you can size down the column in the future. Or you can post larger pictures (which sucks up additional bandwidth), but risk having your past posts look truncated if you ever need to size down the main column. Everything else should lay out nicely regardless of the size. 

We chose to have two 155px columns, because it offered us some flexibility. We could put one column to the left, and on to the right of the main content. We could put them both to one side and create a uber big column. There’s a lot of room to play around.

Also this size fits the skyscaper ad standard of 120px by 600px and vertical banner ad of 120px by 240px. However, it barely misses the wide skyscraper ad size of 160px by 600px. In retrospect, you should probably size your small columsn to be about 160px wide, and we'll change that in the future.

So a lot of sites always tell you that one of the first things you should do when you create a new website is to submit it to directories. This will get you page rank supposedly.

We used to do this, but have found that we get very little traffic from such activities. In fact, we suspect some of these directories are just submitting to scraper bots that are used to scrape your content for splogs (spam blogs).

Essentially, people who steal your content, stick it on an autogenerated blog, and then put ads all around it.

Also, the process is long and arduous. You have to:

1) Register for an account - hello spam?
2) Click on a link sent to your email address to confirm your account

So when you start learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or you start a new website, you will undoubtfully encounter a term in the industry called "The Google Sandbox Effect."

Wikipedia defines it as follows.

"The Sandbox Effect is a theory used to explain certain behaviours observed with the Google search engine. The Sandbox Effect is the theory that websites with newly-registered domains or domains with frequent ownership or nameserver changes are placed in a sandbox (holding area) in the indexes of Google until it is deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence. Webmasters have claimed that their site will only show for keywords that are not competitive. It appears this effect does not affect new pages unless the domain is in the sandbox."

I hate to break it to you, but this is a myth. Your site can get into Google's index within a week or two of creation. This is the timeline of event when we launced a our site RawSignal

Nov 25 - 27: We launched the site around here.

So on our most popular blog that we maintain (it rocketed from 0 to thousands of uniques a day in the matter of under two months), we've been getting messages that people are adding us to their blog rolls, and then they suggest we should add them.

One such message:
"Ha Ha - Takes care of the snoring issue doesn't it!
I love your site. Got some funny stuff here. BTW I added you to my Blogroll. Perhaps your viewers would like my site:
[removed]

Cheers
Debs"

Hey Everyone,

So my friends and I have started a couple of blogs. We're learning a lot about blogging, and still trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work.

We're seeing some of our blogs get ~10 unique visitors a day to some blogs that can easily maintain ~500 unique visitors a day. 

Anyways, so we decided to start a blog about various things we think our readers might want to know. So that's why we started this blog.