StopMomStop Launched

At first glance, Stop Mom Stop doesn't look to have a clear purpose. The site, which I launched last night, is meant to be a place for mom's everywhere to stop, take a break, and help others learn how to be better moms.

I implemented the vBulletin / Movable Type Integration over there - and doing so actually helped me a good deal in trying to prepare the application itself for the general public - and to understand several of the issues involved in implementing it.

One of the problems I had with BKWeddings was that the site itself was relegated to Google's blog search right off the bat. That site was launched right around the time that Google started to try to weed out blogs from search results - though I still don't understand why. For this implementation, although I am using Movable Type to manage a significant part of the site, I'm refraining from using any blog and ping services, and I'm not listing it in any blog directories or anything related to blogging at all. Tonight or tomorrow, I'll actually set up a blog subdirectory and utilize that area to handle site announcements, announce plans, and generally communicate with the user base, leaving the article publishing area on it's own. That way I get the best of both worlds - with the blog/ping services providing deep links for the site, but not actually detracting from the overall site quality.

A problem I have all around is in maintaining a queue of publishable articles, and maintaining quality control over those articles. I'm hoping to alleviate that issue by starting off with a decent sized queue and then splitting time between editing, content building, and promotion. When things start to work smoothly, I can expand the methodology into new sites - maintaining my attention by providing me with a wide enough variety of things to write about and promote and keeping a publication schedule that my visitors can rely on. (one of these day's I'm going to be working with regularity on this site too!)

From an editorial standpoint, I see that there are several areas that need to be addressed prior to publishing any given article:

• Pictures - any sort of photo or gif-ish image will work, but there needs to be something besides just text
• Whitespace - Too much text, like in this article, is a bad thing. It should be broken up by headings and whitespace. I know google hates too many header tags in an article, so I have to get around to defining a similar css class, and use h2/h3 tags when they are more appropriate
• Spelling
• Content - Content is a bigger discussion, and I don't know the complete answer, but visitors come to expect a certain voice coming from a site, and that voice should be the one that pleases the largest desirable audience. This will take some learning and training
• Quality Outbound Links - links to more information on a given subject, but not just to anywhere - they should be to nothing but savory places. Too many ads, too little content, and it's not worth showing a link. I am not the authority on things, so people need places to go for more information

Lately I've been considering something I did with BKWeddings a while back. I wrote a nice little script to rotate between advertisers and ad locations to prevent users from becoming ad blind. While I like the implementation, it has struck me that there is a better way to do things. Ad's should be placed really where users will see them. This can change with any given article. Why not build a system that has a default ad location, and can be easily adjusted on the fly to relocate/redeploy an advertisement with a design and position to be more successful? My problem is that I have entirely too many thoughts on how to implement such a thing, so for now I'll start off with canned locations and worry about ad placement a little bit later.

I do have a nutch site search implementation raring to go for stopmomstop, but again, implementation of these things is never a three step process. It's taking a while to get that going, but once it is done, it should be easy to implement others in a similar fashion.