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the other visitors – your role is to set up the software that makes this<br />
possible, handling the technical side of things. Once your visitors make<br />
friends and find that people posting give them useful information (or just<br />
amusing writing), they will keep coming back, day after day, often even<br />
making time for it when they really ought to be doing something else. Even<br />
better, you don't have to pay anyone to produce content, because the<br />
members of your community are producing more content for each other<br />
than you could ever hope to commission commercially. The only rewards<br />
they ask for are the replies they get from other members.<br />
Altogether, this adds up to an attractive proposition. Even better is the fact<br />
that the owners of online communities tend to quickly acquire cult<br />
leader-like status thanks to their ability to make the final decision when it<br />
comes to deciding who can be part of the community and who can't.<br />
Members don't even slightly resent supporting them, and will donate over<br />
and over again to make the website better – not only will they tolerate ads,<br />
but they'll click on them more in an effort to support you. There are forums<br />
out there that run entirely on community contributions: the Something<br />
Awful community forums and Metafilter community blog, for example,<br />
charge $10 and $5 respectively per membership, and yet both have tens of<br />
thousands of members.<br />
What You Need for Your Community.<br />
Of course, thousands of members don't just appear overnight. To get people<br />
to start coming and writing in the hope of getting a response, you need to<br />
give them a reason to come to your website in the first place.<br />
In many cases, your software will be what differentiates you. You're likely to<br />
be competing with other, similar community websites, and providing better<br />
features than the next guy can drive a surprising number of visitors to your<br />
website. If you listen to and act on every request, you can't do far wrong –<br />
find out the visitors' ideal features, and go out of your way to provide them,<br />
whatever they might be.<br />
Another excellent way to build initial traffic to your site is to provide some<br />
data that's rare or difficult to get elsewhere, or to organize data in a way that<br />
will be especially useful to a certain community. You could, for example,<br />
compile live stock price data in a way relevant to a certain business sector, or<br />
The Web Design Guide for Newbies |96
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