Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual

The Web sites you've created so far are lonely affairs. Visitors can come and look around, but there aren't any avenues for them to really participate. If this were a one-way medium like cable television or newspapers, this wouldn't be a problem. But the Internet is all about community , which means you need to let your visitors react , respond, and (occasionally) harass you.

How do you start transforming your Web site into a Web community? The first trick is to change your perspective, so that you plan your Web site as a meeting place instead of just a place to vent your (admittedly brilliant ) thoughts. Here are a few tips to help you get in the right frame of mind:

• Clearly define the purpose of your site . For example, the description "www.BronteRevival.com is dedicated to bringing Charlotte Bronte fans together to discuss and promote her work" is more community-oriented than "www.BronteRevival.com contains information and criticism of Charlotte Bronte's work." The first description indicates what the site aims to accomplish, while the second reflects what it contains, thereby limiting its scope. Once you've defined a single- sentence description, you can use it in your description meta tag (Section 11.3.1) or in a mission statement on your homepage.

  UP TO SPEED Talking the Talk

  Community is so important to the Web that ubergeeks have their own catchy jargon to describe the process of people meeting up online. Here are some popular terms so you won't feel left out of the discussion: A netizen is an active, responsible citizen of the Internetsomeone who takes Web community as seriously as life in the real world. Flaming is a blistering exchange of insults on a public forum. If you post your personal theory about how an alien race created the human species on a discussion group about evolution, you're sure to be flamed. Trolling is the act of enticing people to flame you, either to make them look ridiculous or just for sport. For example, if you ask for donations for your "Hillary for President" campaign on a Web site for young Republicans, you're trolling. Blogging is the practice of posting regular, dated entries on a special kind of Web site (which is called a blog short for Web log). Blogs can contain anything from detailed technical articles to rambling, random thoughts. Often, bloggers let other people add comments to their blog entries, which allows blogs to become another forum for community interaction. You'll learn about blogs in Chapter 17.

• Build gathering places . No one wants to hang around a collection of links and static text. Jazz your site up with discussion forums or chat boards , where your visitors can kick up their heels. You'll learn how to get these bits in place later in this chapter.

• Give your visitors different roles . Successful community sites recognize different levels of contribution. At one extreme, the right people can grow into leadership roles and even coordinate events, newsletters, or portions of the site. At the other end are visitors who are happiest lurking in the background and watching what others do. There are different ways to recognize individual contributionsome sites use a personal feedback rating system that adds gold stars (or some other sort of icon) next to a person's name . Another approach is to give certain visitors more powerslike the ability to manage members in a Google group (Section 12.3.1).

• Advertise new content before and after you add it . In order to get visitors coming back again and again, you need lots of new content. But new content on its own isn't enoughyou need to build up visitors' expectation of new content so that they know to return, and you need to clearly highlight the new material so that they can find it once they do. To help this work smoothly, try adding links on your first page that lead to newly added content, along with a quick line or two about upcoming content you're planning to add (and when it'll be there).

• Introduce regular events . It's hard to force yourself to update your site regularlyand even when you do, visitors have no way to know when there's something that makes a return visit worthwhile. Why not help everyone keep track of what's going on by promoting regular events (like a news section that's updated weekly or a promotional drawing that happens on a set date)?

• Create feedback loops . It's a law of the Webgood sites keep getting better, while bad sites magnify their mistakes. To help your site get on the right track, make sure there's a way for visitors to tell you what they like. Then, spend the bulk of your time strengthening what works (and tossing out what doesn't).

To get some more ideas for community building, check out the book Community Building on the Web by Amy Jo Kim. You can read portions of it online at www.naima.com/community.

Now that you have your Web site good-citizenship philosophy straight, it's time to learn how to build the ingredients every Web community needs.