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the other visitors – your role is to set up the software that makes this possible, handling the technical side of things. Once your visitors make friends and find that people posting give them useful information (or just amusing writing), they will keep coming back, day after day, often even making time for it when they really ought to be doing something else. Even better, you don't have to pay anyone to produce content, because the members of your community are producing more content for each other than you could ever hope to commission commercially. The only rewards they ask for are the replies they get from other members. Altogether, this adds up to an attractive proposition. Even better is the fact that the owners of online communities tend to quickly acquire cult leader-like status thanks to their ability to make the final decision when it comes to deciding who can be part of the community and who can't. Members don't even slightly resent supporting them, and will donate over and over again to make the website better – not only will they tolerate ads, but they'll click on them more in an effort to support you. There are forums out there that run entirely on community contributions: the Something Awful community forums and Metafilter community blog, for example, charge $10 and $5 respectively per membership, and yet both have tens of thousands of members. What You Need for Your Community. Of course, thousands of members don't just appear overnight. To get people to start coming and writing in the hope of getting a response, you need to give them a reason to come to your website in the first place. In many cases, your software will be what differentiates you. You're likely to be competing with other, similar community websites, and providing better features than the next guy can drive a surprising number of visitors to your website. If you listen to and act on every request, you can't do far wrong – find out the visitors' ideal features, and go out of your way to provide them, whatever they might be. Another excellent way to build initial traffic to your site is to provide some data that's rare or difficult to get elsewhere, or to organize data in a way that will be especially useful to a certain community. You could, for example, compile live stock price data in a way relevant to a certain business sector, or The Web Design Guide for Newbies |96
organize TV listings so that they show all the times a certain show can be seen, whatever channel it's on. If you can find something unique, people will flock to it and love it. Advertising a Community Website. One thing to note about this kind of website is that they don't respond well to traditional promotion – few people will respond positively to an ad asking them to join a community. Why should they write for you when you're obviously only in it for commercial gain? Instead, you should make sure your community relates to something you have a genuine interest in, and then promote it casually in other relevant communities. An ideal situation is one where the owner of an existing website doesn't have the time for it any more, and you can move their community over to your site – this kind of 'evacuation' can give your site a thriving community overnight. Once you've got a community, of course, don't underestimate how much promotion its members will do themselves: they will link it from everywhere they get a chance to put links, email things from it to friends, show it to people they know and get them to join – the possibilities are endless. If you care for your community properly, it will pay you back many times over. Putting Multimedia to Good Use. Multimedia on the web is often seen as a bad idea: it breaks the flow of textual information, makes your bandwidth costs spiral out of control, and annoys visitors who aren't expecting it. Used properly, though, multimedia can enhance your website to no end, putting you light-years ahead of your competitors. The Principle of Least Surprise. The most important thing to remember with multimedia is this: never, ever include multimedia in a page unexpectedly. You think it'd be neat to put a video of yourself greeting your customers on your homepage? Maybe some background music for your product catalogue? For the love of God, don't. There are few worse things on the web than going to a website and having it try to throw unwanted multimedia at you. The time to give your visitors multimedia content is when they have explicitly The Web Design Guide for Newbies |97
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ABOUT WEB DESIGNER PAD Web Designer
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Chapter 1: Why You Need a Website?
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Chapter 2: How the Web Works. Many
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Resource Location) while hosting is
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cost. Prepared to be surprised by s
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POP3 accounts. POP stands for 'Post
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these), as well as the email addres
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website to do. What kind of thing d
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professionals, have you? Well, the
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If you don't want to deal with desi
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If you're willing to take the less
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While Mozilla is a web browser itse
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GIF stands for Graphics Interchange
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As the web grew, the lack of standa
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Now, though, you can remove the fon
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intended on every web browser out t
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the web without ever knowing a thin
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out in the lead in terms of market
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hire a professional web designer, o
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graphics may be stored in the cache
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Note that you will need to save fil
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heading is, so h1 for a page's main
Page 46 and 47: 500 - Internal server error. For mo
Page 48 and 49: easons. To begin with, there are tw
Page 50 and 51: that come with Windows, they don't
Page 52 and 53: What's So Bad About Tables? If you'
Page 54 and 55: text-align. Lets you align text on
Page 56 and 57: each down further than the main con
Page 58 and 59: start growing, though, you might fi
Page 60 and 61: the 'glue' that makes a database-dr
Page 62 and 63: Basic-like language named VBScript,
Page 64 and 65: Yet, despite how common databases a
Page 66 and 67: Which Database is Right for You? If
Page 68 and 69: Once you've created your website, y
Page 70 and 71: that is how easy it makes it to cre
Page 72 and 73: mysql_fetch_assoc. Turns the result
Page 74 and 75: Separating the Application Logic. T
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Page 78 and 79: double-click. onmouseover. Runs whe
Page 80 and 81: limits, and do more testing than yo
Page 82 and 83: and no-one else supports it. For be
Page 84 and 85: } } ajax = new ActiveXObject("Micro
Page 86 and 87: is being used - useful when you see
Page 88 and 89: on. Resizing works especially well,
Page 90 and 91: provides almost every feature you c
Page 92 and 93: on the Linux GTK (Gimp Toolkit) sys
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Page 98 and 99: asked for it. You should link to it
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Page 104 and 105: usiness with you. However, you shou
Page 106 and 107: the checkbox a name so you can refe
Page 108 and 109: same thing goes for lists of states
Page 110 and 111: One of the biggest issues with prin
Page 112 and 113: If you're about to write out a big
Page 114 and 115: don't hide anything from the people
Page 116 and 117: It's Not a Newspaper. What's the di
Page 118 and 119: color is a big subject. As soon as
Page 120 and 121: important in one way: the meta desc
Page 122 and 123: It's not difficult to switch betwee
Page 124 and 125: fonts.com and typography.com for a
Page 126 and 127: sets are red-green; blue-orange, an
Page 128 and 129: while sans-serif fonts have a tende
Page 130 and 131: Look at it this way: not only are y
Page 132 and 133: your content, or, worse, even hide
Page 134 and 135: sure that your design will work jus
Page 136 and 137: Smart Tags. Do you think it ends th
Page 138 and 139: This principle is even more importa
Page 140 and 141: Each option links through to anothe
Page 142 and 143: At this point, you'd have a big pro
Page 144 and 145: one key question you should ask the
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Now, when users hover over the prin
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come to associate its use with that
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tends to provoke is "hey, I was loo
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The Reader Often Crashes. As a fina
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The next problem is the way Java te
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Here's something that many people d
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Trackbacks. Using blog software tha
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Chapter 38: Switching Web Hosts. Fi
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