is it better to publish articles on your site first and then on an article site, or does it matter at all.
You must first make content for your site and then promote it with article marketing and other SEM techniques.
I agree. Do the articles at an article site where there are more viewers than at your site. The hope would be to attract visitors from that site to yours. Your article on your website wont show up on a search like it would on their website unless you have a very high PR.
Any article that you create should be published on your site and indexed before you send it to the article sites. Without the indexing on your site first, the article will become the "first copy" and you will become a "duplicate copy". Even if you have the page up on your site for months, without it being indexed it doesn't count.
Yup, you will need to wait until you got your articles indexed first before you publish it on article directories.
Usually two ways are being used by webmasters in this regard, sometimes the original copy of the article is found and listed on the site itself as well as tens of other directories and at some other times the webmasters merely use the article distribution services for this purpose and forget about addition of the posts to their sites.