52sites started as an experiment, a kind of speed-web-entrepreneur survivor. That’s us, Jon and Arthur, brothers. We were going to build a revenue-generating website every week for a year. Neither of us were developers, but we knew our way around basic HTML and CSS. We relied on free CMSes (especially WordPress), free themes and plugins, and a lot of expensive trial and error, spread widely over what was once free time.

The rules were to build each site ourselves, and to keep costs as low as possible, ideally to domain registration fees only — about $12 per site. The aim was to make back our costs, and learn. We got to half a dozen sites each before we discovered much more important things to put our days to. And we never covered even our domain-registration fees. But we did learn a lot.

These days, Jon runs an online-advertising agency and Arthur runs a startup.