I'm sure if you've been following my journal, you've noticed that the subject matter so far has been fairly random. There is a method to the madness. It has been an educational exercise and an experiment of sorts.
About this site
My goal with this site is to set up something personable and valuable which can serve as a launching point for my future endeavors. I knew when launching this site that I wanted to serve up a series of webmaster related tools - things that I'm building for myself that I may as well release to the public at large. In doing so, I was hoping to gain inbound links, a reputation among my peers, and a high enough quality domain to feed traffic to my other projects. Since this domain contains my name, I also want to ensure that this site is something that I don't mind people seeing that know me personally or that I may come across in the business world.When I decided to publish a blog, I didn't know much about blogging (still don't for that matter), but what I did know is that blogging is a fairly easy way to publish information on a daily basis. I've certainly discovered that daily publication requires a large amount of dedication and a good amount of work, especially with something that doesn't have any real goals as far as subject matter. I've been off and on with my entry creation habits, but for the most part I've kept this site updated close to daily aside from the holiday season. The experience of doing so has been enlightening. While I've tried to make updates daily, I've found (and my visitors have found) that there are times when I have something meaningful to share, and that other times I'm just babbling about what happens to be on my mind. I've also found from reviewing my own content that my stream of consciousness has varied greatly depending on what I happen to be working on - so much so that I'm surprised that I am actually maintaining any actual repeat visitor base at all (I currently fluctuate between 500 and 1200 daily visitors). I haven't reached a point yet where I feel that this site is providing real value to my visitors, but I actually do feel that I'm closing in on that point. In the next quarter I hope to have the site structure here pushed to a more logical level - with a section of tutorials, a section for tools, various downloads, daily publication of blog-ish information in one section, and regular publication of information that is more research based, extensive, and on-topic to the interests of my regular visitors.
The templating of this site is supposed to be a basis for other templates - I expect to experiment with various things in regards to site optimization, user interaction, search engine optimization, and all other things webmaster-ish and when I find things working - pushing the results out to my other sites. By templating, I'm not just talking about the HTML design, but also in regards to other repeatable elements as well (anything from back end scripting, to search functionality, publication intervals, publication interface, etc.).
Now that I've shared the basics of what I'm doing here, I have a few thoughts on my plans for other sites that will start popping up with regularity over the next several months. Rather than discuss the subject matter of the sites, I'm going to talk a little bit about the shared elements.
Quality and Quantity of Content
Ideally, you would want to publish an interesting informative article on a daily basis, but that is not very realistic of a goal for a single person to handle every day for a single site, let alone a group of sites, especially early on in the process. User generated content in the form of articles, discussion forums, and social interaction can certainly help in that regard, but the problem of attracting an end user base that will feed these areas is nearly impossible without a long term plan. If you want visitors to come back every day, you have to give them a reason to. Daily publication of the latest themed news items, quick snippets of information with links to authoritative sites, and off-topic but interesting to the user base information is the goal early on. There should be at least a thirty-day queue of this kind of information. (Obviously the latest news can't be queued, so that can be inserted in the mix as it pops up, delaying other less time sensitive information). These little snippets can't be the only subject matter, so more research intensive (or feature article type things) have to be published with regularity as well. The content should exhibit quality outbound links, easy readability, and be reviewed for editorial quality prior to publication.Tools, Utilities, and other Useful Things
Each site should have a regularly addressed library of useful things - anything from a quick online javascript based utility to a download-able application and everywhere in between. Things like excel templates, topic-oriented lists, mapping mash-ups, or database-centric access to information are all on the list of to-dos. A means of supporting users must also be in place.The Basics
The basics need to be addressed in the site template - things like Privacy Policy, User Feedback mechanisms, contact information, an About page, RSS Feeds, etc. It should be easy to customize this information from site to site.FAQ
I've looked at countless frequently asked questions management systems and I haven't found anything that is very good to deal with from a multi-site, multi-subject perspective. This is a foundational aspect that needs to be addressed. What I need to have is something that produces an easily navigable set of questions and answers that can be set up in various locations on a site as needed. It should be able to grow easily, and produce a set of documents with end user friendly urls. This is really part of the basics, but it is important enough to address on it's own.Discussion Forum
Message boards are notoriously server intensive and also notoriously bad as far as revenue generation goes. They are difficult to maintain and difficult to get off of the ground. The upside is that they can build a user base that not only visits daily, but several times a day. I see a discussion area as an inherent property of a quality site.Promotional Activity
As important as the basic aspects of each site is the repeatability of promotional mechanisms - from SEO to press releases to pay-per-click advertising to banner ads - the promotional solution should be repeatable across all sites so it can turn into something that can be managed easily on a daily basis. Promotional activity also includes participation in the interaction interfaces of other quality websites along the same theme. I will not be spamming other boards with links, commenting on blogs just to pick up a link or anything like that. More so the idea is to gain reputation in larger communities and to pick up visitors from those communities as they get to know my online persona.Sitemapping
Sitemapping is something that I see done wrong everywhere I look. People pay little attention to what they are doing with their sitemaps, and do little to manage them once they set up a publication interface. In managing multiple sites, I want to do things right the first time around, not have to react as the infrastructure around me matures. Having a single interface for managing my own set of sitemaps is one step in that direction, and one that should give me an edge.Vertical Relevance
Producing quality content is one thing, but vertical relevance is an entirely different matter. This partially falls into several other categories above. When trying to pick up links from quality resources, you have to have something to link to. Not many quality webmasters will just link to a competitive site without a compelling reason - especially one that does not distinguish itself from other similar sites in the same niche. Vertical relevance means that a site should achieve a set of quality information unrivaled on a themed topic, have a very unique and not easily repeatable utility, or in some other manner have published something that makes that site important to others within the same vertical market space.Reasonable Moderation
The largest problem I see other webmasters dealing with is the quality of moderation. There seem to be two extremes - over-moderation where the end user community is alienated through unreasonable restriction of their actions; or under-moderation where the end user community is exposed to all manners of spam. Achieving the happy middle-ground is not impossible or even very difficult. It simply is a matter of understanding that the end user community is the most important aspect of any given web site.Management Structure
I have done a lot of learning about how to be successful on the web the last several years. A lot of things I've learned are easy to deal with on a site-by-site basis, but they do not scale well. In building a network of sites, the management of the sites needs to be something that can be streamlined, delegated, and scheduled. Outbound links, sitemaps, internal url structure, site searching, publication, site updates, security fixes, statistical analysis, and a host of other issues need to be dealt with regularly. While I don't have a solution for everything, I have addressed several of these issues and as more creep up on me I have my own methodology for documenting the management process so that it can be automated or delegated to make for a more reasonable structure. While I will be managing everything for the foreseeable future, the management of sites needs to be something that does not rely on any one individual and it also needs to be such that the level of complexity and effort involved in management can be handed off to another individual on short notice.Updatability
Each and every site in my network needs to be updated in whole easily. I know things will happen that will need every page to be re-written multiple times over the life of the site. This process needs to be a matter of a simple file edit and a few mouse clicks.Discuss Creating Repeatable Success on The Web
