It’s much more of a featured guest than writer for this issue. And in keeping with other issues, once again, I find myself in the company of a talented, pretty girl (this job does have its perks).

During the Summer, Nori and her family spent some real leisure time on the Carribean island of Anguilla. When she returned, she decided that a web site about the beautiful beaches of Anguilla would be a pretty cool idea. For most teenagers, that’s where the idea might end. But Nori’s father is legendary online marketer Ken Evoy, and she’s certainly inherited that entrepreneurial spirit.

Without any experience whatsoever, Nori logged into Site Build It, the online web development and marketing suite of tools for start-ups (which was developed by her Dad’s company)and launched anguilla-beaches.com

Nori was kind enough to take a break from homework, girlfriends and potential online marketing domination, to have a little chat with me.

(NB: No matter what level you’re at with your online efforts, I guarantee you’ll still find some little gems in this interview.)

Read it and weep guys.

Mike: Nori, I’ve just finished looking over your site and I have to say I’m very impressed.

Nori: I’m glad you like it. I wish I had more time to do it, but I’m busy with school, band and other things too, especially homework and friends.

Mike: I know it’s something I’m not supposed to ask a lady: but how old are you Nori and when was the first time you went to Anguilla?

Nori: I turned 14 in August. Our first trip was for 10 days in March. We all loved it so much that we decided to spend the whole month of August there.

Mike: Your Dad’s been involved with the Internet for a long time. Is that something you’d already decided you’d like to do anyway, or did you just get the inspiration for a web site in Anguilla? And if you did get the inspiration in Anguilla, was it helped along a little bit by your Dad when he’d had the odd rum punch or two.

Nori: Ha! Ha! He calls himself the official rum punch Anguilla tester. He wants to do a page on the best rum punch. When my Dad saw how much I loved Anguilla, especially because we both like to explore and get a bit adventurous, he suggested that I could make a Web site about it, get people to visit it, and then start to refer those people to good folks we know on the island for referral fees. It has become a very busy site - my dad does not write my material, but he does push me to “say it better, Nori.”

He also gives me tips… like to take my time on making money. Right now, it’s a hobby site, so I have a free listing in zeal.com (it took me four tries to pass their test). That listing brings me a lot of traffic from LookSmart and MSN, for free. Dad says there’s lots of time to make money with the site, just to get the content right for now.

Mike: I guess you must use the Internet a lot for homework and fun stuff and everything. So you probably knew quite a bit about how it works and how to find stuff with search engines. But had you ever tried to make a web page yourself before you started this web site?

Nori: I chat a lot on the Net with my girlfriends. And my Dad showed me how to do some advanced searching that my friends don’t really get. But no, I had no idea how to make a web site. I asked him to show me how it works and he showed me all the code in a Web page and how the software browser reads that and turns it into a page. I could never do that and I could never figure out the search engines without it. And I would find it boring, anyway. I just like writing about Anguilla and our adventures.

Mike: Lots of people just throw up web pages for a hobby and don’t pay much attention to how they look. A lot of them that I see have a layout like a badly made bed with pictures which look like they were shot with the camera lens cap still on and navigation bars like a row of three day old pizzas.

But you have a neat layout with nice clear pictures and really cool graphics. Can you tell me about how you planned your site, what the most important piece of advice was and what development tools you used to make it look so professional?

Nori: I used my Dad’s Site Build It!, which is so easy. It helps to have my dad, of course. But I could do this without him… actually, I do now. It forces you to do one step at a time… research for keywords first. Then pick a domain. For me “anguilla beaches” was a very profitable keyword, so that’s what I used for my domain.

I can make any kind of layout I like, from using one of theirs to making my own, totally, using Photoshop (which I don’t know how to do except to make collages of my favorite stars) or to use the LogoCreator and NavBarMaker and the look and feel builder to build my own. That’s what I did. Yes, my friends have no idea how I do it. They think I’m a programming genius, so I hope they don’t read this!

Mike: How long did it take you from planning the site to uploading the pages? And tell me how you felt both when you saw it online for the first time and how it felt when you checked to see if anyone else had been to see it.

I build one page a week. That’s all I have time for. It’s fast because I just prepare it all offline - my dad even shared my tip for how I do it with everyone else. So the whole page only takes me about an hour, 55 minutes of which is just to prepare what I want to say, how I want to say it, and so on. My dad has worked hard with me on my writing skills over the year, and he still reviews each page with me after I publish it. You should understand that this does not make the content for you - that has to come from your brain. It just makes it so easy to build. It submits to all the engines. It analyzes your pages if I forget to use enough keywords in a place, for example, it tells me. I have an e-zine. But it just makes all that easy to do. As my Dad says to people (when I hear him on the phone), “you still have to do it.”

Mike: Okay, here comes the tough one. Everyone knows that your Dad’s an expert with all this stuff. So, some people might think that he just did it for you. Or most of it (I know: Some people are just born skeptics). I know SBI is designed for people with no experience at all, but you still have to write copy and create graphics and all that stuff. How easy did you find it and what was the part you enjoyed most about using SBI to build your site.

Nori: I wrote it all, but my Dad uses it to push how well I tell the story after I build a page. As he says, he helps me “brush” it. And he took 99% of the photos with his new digital camera, which he is crazy about - except for underwater snorkeling. Boy, was he upset about how bad those came out. The most important help from my dad was to push me to write better, but not to do the writing or build the site. Site Build It! makes that part very easy to do. He likes to tell the story of when I asked him… “How do normal people do this, make a site and get so much traffic from engines and so forth.”

He smiled and said… “They don’t.”

Mike: Finally, what have you got planned for the site for the future and when you’re the number one online tour operator for Anguilla, will you be able to arrange for free tickets for cheeky search engine marketers based in the UK.

Nori: Ha! Ha! The Arawak Inn already uses my Web page to brag about our review - we loved his pizza. Funny thing is one woman wrote me to tell me that when he showed her my Web page, she showed him the same page and that’s why she was there!

I will start soon, or my dad will - here he WILL help me, to make deals with certain great people we met on the island to refer my visitors to tour operators, real estate agents (especially for villa rentals), my dad’s financial services friend, and so forth. So I do expect this to grow, one page a week (I wish I had more time, but I have so many other things that I only spend an hour per week), and it will start to earn much more than my friends will make in summer jobs during the rest of high school and university. My dad says that I have done such a good job, that if I was an adult, I could be making 10-15 pages per day with this, full-time, and would already be making a few thousand dollars per month.

As it is, I already get more traffic than the Anguilla Tourist Board and other more “famous” sites. Dad sends friends who are interested in this to alexa.com and tells them to compare my site, anguilla-beaches.com, with their site, anguilla-vacation.com, or to just about any other site on Anguillla.

So I’m pretty proud to already be in the top 50,000 sites! It’s a lot of fun, it lets me write what I love (I’m going to start another one on my favorite band, Simple Plan), and I’ll start to make my own money with it very soon. Dad says that’s the easy part -the traffic is the hard part, but that once you build that, it’s a steady stream of traffic, some of who will want to use the people I refer. Also, farther down the road, next time we visit, my dad and I will create a bunch of 1-day “off the beaten track” (and my dad does go crazy) tours of Anguilla. We will sell them as e-books when he adds that part of it to Site Build It!

And of course, we can eat all the free pizza we want, now when we visit. One more thing… I’ve had wonderful e-mail from the Anguilla Tourist Board and the editor of Anguilla Life asked me to write a “Visitor Viewpoint” article for their big Winter edition this year. I wrote on Top 10 things for a Teen to Do in Anguilla. So I can see how a grownup could use this to become quite famous and well-known in his or her area and turn it all into a fun business.

Thanks very much to Nori for sharing the tips she got from her Dad and her own real world experience.