JimWorld Gazette #215: Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Topics in this issue

· Communities: Where Everybody Knows Your Name
· Web Design Basics and Achieving Your Goals
· SEO: Subdomains and Search Engines
· Dreamweaver or FrontPage?
· Moving Forward
· Payment Due Notice
· How To Unsubscribe

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

By Ron Carnell

I was on the phone with Diane Vigil the other day when I suddenly realized I'm a little weird. Big surprise, uh?

We were ostensibly discussing Diane's article for this issue, but as is our wont, we meandered more than just a bit. The Internet is a diverse garden, and she and I always seem to find a few obscure flowerbeds to explore when we talk. Diane is unusually insightful and always makes a verbal stroll around the Web interesting.

At one point, our topic turned to forum participation and, specifically, why we do it.

Some people, perhaps even most, go to forums like SEF to get advice. It's a bit like going to a party, I imagine, and serendipitously running into a doctor: "Hey, Doc, what would you recommend for this tingling sensation in my foot?" Faced with a stubborn web design problem or traffic that refuses to grow, we all appreciate a little help now and then. On-line communities like SEF are often the only place to find such help.

Those not there to get help are usually there to give it. And their reasons, I think, run a very wide spectrum.

Some are there to promote their business or their products. They've learned that offering free help is a way to establish their expertise, while simultaneously being very visible. If the doctor at that party gave you good advice about your foot, you might just call later and make an appointment about the sharp pain in your leg. Communities are a good place to build trust.

Some offer their help in a spirit of giving back after spending what may have been years receiving help. Some may want to break into the business and will often find their very first client in an on-line community. Some want personal affirmation of hard-won skills. Some are still dedicated to their own on-going education and perhaps scour a half-dozen forums every day, looking for that single nugget of new wisdom, answering questions and contributing in the process. The reasons for participation, I think, are as diverse as the individuals participating.

And then there's me.

A bit more than seven years ago, my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was living nearly 3,000 miles from my folks, in California, and had been for more than twenty years. The archetypical yuppie, I hadn't seen Mom and Dad more than a handful of times in that two decades. They had spent their retirement years traveling the Bluegrass circuits in an RV not much shorter than a football field, while I had spent the same years building a business in the burgeoning software industry.

Death, I think, can sometimes be a wake-up call. In 1997, I sold my business and retired to Michigan. I fooled myself into believing Mom needed me (she didn't), and restructured my life to that end. I started teaching computer classes part-time at a local community college, but mostly I sat in front of a TV with Mom or drove her around to her beloved Bluegrass Festivals. We got reacquainted. Unfortunately, Life is that thing that usually happens while you're busy making other plans, and one year and seventeen days after burying my dad, Mom joined him for the final time. We had a good year together.

I stumbled into JimWorld and SEF a few months later. Jim Wilson, a kindred soul who ironically lived ten miles from my old house in California, immediately made me feel at home. My company had put together a few web sites in 1995 and 1996, but it wasn't our real focus, and Jim quickly showed me we never really knew what we were doing. So, I set out to learn and managed to build a few moderately successful web sites in the process. We'll talk about one of those in a minute.

What makes my participation in the forums a little unusual is that in spite of a few successful sites, I'm really still retired.

I don't have a business to promote and, indeed, don't want a business to promote. I don't even have a web site dedicated to SEO, SEM or web design. Talking to Diane made me realize I'm a little weird because my participation in SE forums across the Internet is what I do just for fun. In Michigan, where it's usually snowing, raining, or so hot and humid you need an aerator to breath, forums are simply a lot easier for an old fart than playing golf.

Here's the thing, though. Turns out I'm weird, but I'm not that unusual. If you can see that, if you can use that, it might just help you to grow your own traffic.

Ray Oldenburg, another one of those Ph.D.s like Google has made so famous, is a sociologist who wrote a book some ten years ago, called The Great Good Place. In it, he writes about the vital importance to society of informal public gathering places, essentially dividing our social life into three "places." Our first place is the home, our second place is work, and the neighborhood bars, bowling alleys, and coffee shops are our collective "third places."

Unfortunately, these third places are becoming increasingly difficult to find. Following World War II, according to Oldenburg, older neighborhoods have often lost their cafes, taverns and corner stores to the ravages of urban renewal and freeway expansion, while newer neighborhoods have developed under single-use zoning restrictions that make these critical third places illegal to even operate.

"Life without community," writes Oldenburg, "Has produced, for many, a life style consisting mainly of a home-to-work-and-back-again shuttle. Social well-being and psychological health depend upon community." Later in the book, he writes, "What suburbia cries for are the means for people to gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably -- a 'place on the corner,' real life alternatives to television, easy escapes from the cabin fever of marriage and family that do not necessitate getting into an automobile."

Gee, sound familiar?

Now, I'm certainly not going to suggest that on-line communities can or should take the place of the real-world ones Oldenburg contends are so vital to a healthy life. I don't expect Sam or Woody to serve me a beer, and I'm going to be real surprised if Cliff and Norm sit down on the stools beside me. Still, the camaraderie and friendliness of a good forum shows some marked similarities to a place like the fictionalized but very real Cheers. Spend a few weeks interacting with your peers, and SEF can quickly become a third place for you, a place "Where everybody knows your name."

According to Oldenburg, I'm not unique (though probably still weird), and obviously the need for third places isn't something distinct to web designers, either. The question you might be asking yourself right now is whether YOUR audience needs an on-line community, too.

I can promise you two things. It'll be worth it, and it won't be easy.

One of the sites I run, and have been running for over five years, is a community forum dedicated to writers. It fits in well with my other sites, providing a firm foundation both in terms of traffic and content. Even with controlled growth (registrations are closed and invitation-only), we have over 180,000 pages of content. If all my SE rankings disappeared tomorrow, I know I'd still have several thousand daily visitors. And most importantly, at least for me, my community has provided a wealth of inspiration and friendship.

As many have discovered, however, getting a community off the ground can be both frustrating and incredibly difficult. That's because it's one of those chicken and egg things. You need people to participate if you want to build an interesting forum, but no one wants to participate in a forum until it is interesting. The most lonely sight in the world is an empty forum, lights shining in every room, but no one around to enjoy them. Like a sustainable nuclear reaction, community needs a critical mass if it is to survive.

There aren't many hard and fast rules, but I can offer a few guidelines based on my own experiences and those of friends.

* Communities, like most living things, can't readily be grown in a vacuum. There are always exceptions, but most successful communities are the children of successful sites, usually driven by content. I had a site dedicated to writers, with lots of content, long before I opened a forum dedicated to writers. Without preexisting content, you won't get enough traffic to reach critical mass.

* A community has to have a core. Sometimes that can be one very tireless person (probably you), but usually you need more than a single voice to carry on a meaningful conversation. I had seven writers, besides myself, when I opened the doors to our forums, and we honestly didn't much care if anyone else ever joined us. We enjoyed each other's company enough that slow growth, inevitable in the beginning, wasn't a frustration. We were having fun, something visitors quickly picked up on. (Years later, five of the seven original writers remain, proving at least that our fun wasn't short-lived.)

* Critical mass is a funny thing. If you start out with twenty specialized forums, each with one post, you're still a long way from reaching critical mass. If you start out with one general forum, however, those twenty posts are a bit more impressive. My community started out with just two forums, though we have over ninety of them today. Don't be afraid to start small.

* For a community to become a home, it's going to require routine maintenance and cleaning. No one likes to scrub floors, but it nonetheless has to be done. You'll probably have commercial posts that aren't appropriate, and you'll almost certainly have abusive or offensive posts. Keep your house clean. But don't go on a power trip and become obsessive about it, either. It's not a showcase. It's a place where people live.

* In a similar vein, sooner or later you're going to need people to help. Moderators should be selected very carefully -- and then treated like the assets they are. Remember that your team does much more than simple housekeeping. They set the tone, and the example, for everyone in the community. Always, always, always be loyal to your people. Else no one will be loyal to you.

* Software is your friend. How you configure yours will, in large part, determine the personality of your community. Here's what I think is the most simple and almost infallible secret of running a community. If you want people to do something, the software should make it very easy to do. If you want to discourage people from doing something, the software should make it difficult or even impossible to do. Instead of telling people how to use the tools you provide (because no one likes rules), make sure they can only use them in ways that help the community.

It's a bit funny, and perhaps ironic, that Diane called me to get some ideas for her article, and then ended up inspiring me to write this one. I guess that's the way it is with friends.

It's not so funny, however, that I now have this "Where Everybody Knows Your Name" tune incessantly playing in my head and driving me slowly nuts.

You hear it, too? I guess that's also the way it is with Community. :-)

PERTINENT LINKS:

The Psychology of Cyberspace
http://www.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html

Although badly dated (1996), this very extensive treatise on community is one of the most fascinating and useful reads I've yet found on the Internet. The software and expectations have clearly changed a lot in eight years, but community is really about the people -- and they haven't changed a bit.

The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/

This is, again, a bit old and probably more nostalgically interesting than honestly useful. It's the complete text of Rheingold's classic book on some of the earliest electronic communities, some predating the Web. If you like soap operas, you'll probably love this stuff.

Information Design of Community Building
http://eserver.org/courses/s01/tc510/lazarus/Community/community.html

Though perhaps a little scholarly (okay, boring), this article gives some good background on how best to "design" a community. This will particularly apply to which sets of forums, features and rules you might want to adopt.

A Case Study of Electronic Community Building
http://www.stanford.edu/~holeton/wired-frosh/

Equally scholarly and substantially less friendly, this case study of building a community in a college dormitory nonetheless offers some good food for thought.

Make Your Community Pay
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/community-pay

This Sitepoint article is too short, but will at least give you some ideas on ways you can monetize a community site.

Super Moderator Guide
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/super-moderator-guide

Another Sitepoint article, this is a really excellent exploration of how (and why!) to recruit help with your community. There are a lot of things that can make or break your community, but moderator selection has to be at the very top of the list. Read this one!

Web Design Basics and Achieving Your Goals

Guest Article by Diane Vigil

Many of us, in our early days of website building, encountered various studies and sites which helped to educate us in the art and science of building websites. These may have improved our knowledge base and abilities by giving us information with which to think about and approach the planning, design and building of more effective, usable, and ultimately successful websites.

I started out by revamping our first website in 1997; I didn't know how to do it, didn't know anyone who did, and had to get this done fast. It's tough: we are designing, we are writing ad copy, we are coding, we are facing search engines. I, too, ended up at the usual places where I benefited from the data, and so did our website.

Somewhere along the line, though, I realized that some of what I was reading or had read in the past was not true, or certainly not true in all cases. Being a marketer at heart as well as by profession, recognizing some of these inaccuracies was easy; for others -- particularly those I had encountered early on -- I simply had had no frame of reference against which to judge their accuracy, and yet there they were, in the foundation of my education.

And that is one of my points here: when you are entering a sphere for which you haven't much data, especially one as complex, confusing and technical as the Web, it is easy to adopt concepts without examining them in depth. Thereafter, you have unexamined concepts -- "fixed ideas" if you will -- in your skill and knowledge base.

A good example is the "you must get them to the page they're looking for within three clicks" rule. Did it sound good? Sure. No doubt it helped a lot of designers to reevaluate paths through websites. But who knows how many web designers followed this dictum for years, or repeated it to others, before new survey data emerged to disprove it. (Gotta make you wonder about that original survey, doesn't it?)

So, some time ago I realized that it was time: time to examine some of these basic ideas included in the foundation of my knowledge. Now, this doesn't mean that I suddenly concluded that everything I knew was invalid; our sites are generally successful, some wildly so, and all have increased the visibility and income of their owners. Nor was I advocating invalidating knowledge and experience out of hand; just simply that it was time to re-examine the basis of my knowledge, and particularly those items that had not been evaluated then, or lately. Keep what's good, toss what's not, etc.

And I come up with this: a thing is only true if it's true. And often, what is true may not always be true in a vacuum without considering the precise circumstances within which we're trying to apply a particular datum.

Planning projects and designing sites in the absence of fixed ideas and uninspected "shoulds" frees you to address the projects before you and to devise solutions unencumbered by "stuck" ideas. Armed with your knowledge and skill, you can more easily evaluate when to utilize concepts, when to break the rules, and when something else entirely might be needed.

Because the bottom line, and the one thing that all these "shoulds" is meant to solve, is that any website you build is being built for a purpose. It's just easier to do if you don't place uninspected roadblocks in your way.

PERTINENT LINKS:

Testing the Three-Click Rule
http://www.uie.com/articles/three_click_rule/

This 2003 article by Joshua Porter at UIE explains the methodology that finally exposed one of design's most persistent myths.

Scents and Sensibility
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=587294

If not a 3-Click Rule, then what? Researchers at Palo Alto theorize that links all have scents that visitors use to navigate through a site. Give your visitor a whiff of potential success, and they'll keep right on clicking.

------

Diane Vigil (best known as DianeV in the forums) has been coaching others in the industry for a number of years, and is founder of DianeV. Web Design Studio ( http://dianev.com ) in Los Angeles. She is a long-time proponent of what is today called "holistic web design" - the use of a variety of disciplines to create effective market-oriented websites.

Subdomains and Search Engines

By Ron Carnell

Subdomains are a recurring quandary. Hardly a week goes by in the forums that someone somewhere doesn't ask if they can maybe improve their SE rankings by creating a few subdomains. Since last issue's article, To WWW or Not, generated so much mail (some of which I'm still struggling to answer), I thought perhaps we could address at least a few similar issues in this issue.

For those still scratching their heads, let's define some terms.

The DNS hierarchy consists of the root-level domain at the top, followed by top-level domains (TLD) like .com, .net, .org and a host of others. Then comes the domain, sometimes called a second-level domain, like example.com (try going to example.com, sometime, and you'll discover why writers should use this for all, uh, examples). Finally, a subdomain, sometimes called a child domain or a third-level domain, can be defined as part of the hierarchy. That leaves us with subdomain.example.com.

Astute readers will quickly realize that subdomain.example.com looks a whole lot like www.example.com. In our last issue, I explained that www existed because, back in the old days, one computer couldn't always handle all our Internet traffic, so we'd put different parts on different machines. So, www.example.com would handle our Web traffic, mail.example.com would handle our email, and maybe ftp.example.com would be our FTP server.

Subdomains can be used in much the same way.

In fact, one of the earliest uses of subdomains was in Universities, with each department often running their own server, giving us med.stanford.edu or math.stanford.edu. Using multiple servers is STILL one of the best justifications for subdomains, something you see done a lot at microsoft.com, as just one example.

And that should answer one of the more common forum questions I see. A lot of hosting companies are now offering 10 free subdomains with each account, but when you try to configure one you discover it has to go inside your main domain's folder. That essentially makes blog.example.com an alias for example.com/blog/. This is a limitation of the hosting company and NOT a limitation on subdomains. It's also a good example, I suspect, of something being worth what you paid for it. Free subdomains will probably always be limited to some extent.

So, what do search engines thing about subdomains?

Somewhere around 1999, a few of us discovered we could almost instantly capture a number one ranking on the old Excite search engine by the simple expedient of creating a subdomain using our keyword. For example, spaghetti.example.com was almost guaranteed to be number one for spaghetti. A very large part of the reason for this was that Excite always gave the home page of a domain a *significant* boost over interior pages. Ergo, spaghetti.example.com/ was always better than example.com/spaghetti /.

That's no longer true, of course, and I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone that subdomains were BADLY abused for a year or more. Like white text on white background, it was just too easy to last for long. In today's world, I've seen no indications in any of the major search engines that using a subdomain, in and of itself, will improve rankings.

However, that "in and of itself" is an important qualifier.

Inbound links and, especially, anchor text have grown dramatically in importance, and using a subdomain can still indirectly impact your site in that arena. You don't get much of a boost for having a keyword in your subdomain (some will say you get none), but you DO get a boost for having the keyword in any anchor text pointing to your site. Since a lot of people still create "naked links" like http://spagetti.example.com/, where the link and the anchor text is the same, having a keyword in your URL can gradually build some serious advantages.

Another possible use of subdomains is to defeat clustering. Back in the old days, it was entirely possible for one site to dominate the first page in a search; all you needed was ten pages that ranked higher than anyone else's. Searchers wouldn't even see your competition (and it was a huge ego boost, too). Clustering defeated that and today's search engines only show, at most, two pages from any one site. However, subdomains are treated as entirely separate entities, so it's entirely possible to have one.example.com show up with two pages, two.example.com show up with another two pages, etc., once again dominating the first page and burying your competition.

In my opinion, trying to defeat the clustering algorithms with subdomains is potentially a dangerous road to travel. If Google wants to give their visitors a wider array of choices, far be it for me to get in the way of a 900 pound gorilla. I think any trick that subverts the *intentions* of a search engine can only lead to short-term gain.

In June of 2002, I started a design for what would have been a large and diverse web site for a local community college. The diversity prompted me to use subdomains, especially since keywords in the URL then counted more heavily than today. I had already started to use thematical subdomains when I discovered a warning on Google's webmaster page specifically warning that such use, if done only to influence ranking, would not be seen favorably. Less than two weeks later, when I wanted to reference that warning on a forum, I found it had already been removed. I've never been able to prove it was there, nor have I seen any other suggestions from Google with similar foreboding regarding subdomains, but I've always taken that short-lived warning as an indication of an attitude that "may" lie just below the surface waters at Google.

Aside from SE backlash, which may exist only in my mind, there are some other disadvantages of subdomains.

One important disadvantage is that you need a whole lot more inbound links to rank well. Eight sites with 1,000 links each isn't as strong as one site with 8,000 inbound links. Similarly, eight sites with 100 pages each isn't usually as strong as one size with 800 pages.

Of prime concern, I think, is the very real possibility of running into a cross-linking penalty, especially on Yahoo. If you have eight subdomains and none of them link to each other, you don't have a problem. If you have eight subdomains and every one of them links to seven other subdomains on every page, you almost certainly WILL have a problem. Somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is where you need to be -- and, frankly, unless you have a good feel for where that middle is, I wouldn't recommend taking too many chances. Right now, if you get booted from Yahoo's index for excessive cross-linking, there's nothing for it but to throw away those domains and start over from scratch. The possible reward, in my opinion, simply isn't worth the possible risk.

So, does that mean I would never recommend using subdomains?

Never is a long, long time. Let me close with two examples, one where I feel subdomains would be dangerous and one where I think they could work well.

The site I was building for a community college in 2000 was about creating and running a successful e-commerce site. I initially wanted to have subdomains like hosting.example.com, design.example.com and promotion.example.com. In today's search engine world, I'm convinced a site like this would be a recipe for disaster.

On the other hand, one of the threads currently active at SEF talks about splitting a celebrity site into subdomains. The result might be related sites at britney.example.com, leno.example.com, and maybe robertredford.example.com. Unlike my e-commerce site, I suspect this might work well.

What the difference?

Any visitor interested in e-commerce is going to want to know about hosting AND design AND promotion. On the other hand, a visitor interested in Britney may have no interest at all in Leno. A designer that takes the user's needs into consideration is going to very heavily inter-link the e-commerce sites, but will inter-link the celebrity sites very loosely.

Another way of saying the same thing is that if you want to build separate sites they should all BE separate sites. They can all use the same design, use the same server and IP address, but any compulsion to tie them too closely together from a linking standpoint (as would have been necessary for my e-commerce site) is a good indication you only have one site that has been arbitrary chopped into pieces for better rankings.

And you can bet dollars to donuts the search engines will see it, too.

Dreamweaver or FrontPage?

By Ron Carnell

Which WYSIWYG editor to use is one of those questions that gets asked a lot and only very rarely gets answered. Why? Because someone inevitably comes along and says you shouldn't use a WYSIWYG at all, but instead should learn to hand-code HTML and CSS. Personally, I always get a bit of a kick out of people who automatically turn up their noses at web page editors, and find myself wondering if those people ever used WordStar.

True story time.

Throughout most of the Seventies and early-Eighties, I got my "creativity high" by writing magazine articles. My first two years of college earned me an A.A. degree in Commercial Art, but when I moved from a community college to a university I got chicken and switched to a Business major (I figured starving artist was a cliché for a reason). Even though I kept my camera active, I always missed the creative high of being an exhibiting artist. While I spent the next decade clawing my way through an austere business world, writing for publication on the side answered a very real personal need.

Around 1981, I bought a Commodore 64 with the intention of finally shelving my old manual typewriter. Brought it home, hooked it up to a black and white television, and proceeded to type in my latest article. Only to get a Syntax Error?

Duh. A computer, I soon discovered, is little more than a paper weight without software. And back then, gaming aside, there just wasn't a lot of software to be found. Being incredibly naïve, I decided to write my own word processor. BASIC proved too slow, so I learned 6502 machine language, and -- not coincidentally -- my next twenty published articles all ended up in computer magazines. :)

Word processing in the early-Eighties was not unlike web publishing in the early-Nineties. If you couldn't convert hexadecimal to binary and didn't know that the letter "a" was an ASCII 65, you probably needed a good supply of typewriter ribbons and white-out on hand.

A few years later, I bought an IBM XT and discovered WordStar. Even those who have never used WordStar (and suffered the subsequent brain damage) have probably heard stories about its arcane command structure. It literally took hundreds of hours of use to become proficient enough to actually write without, instead, constantly thinking about how to write.

In my opinion, today's web editors, like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, are still at the WordStar stage of evolution.

Yes, to design good web sites today, you probably need to know HTML and CSS pretty well. Just like I once had to know 6502 assembler, ASCII codes, and every Control Key combination some programmer with a bad sense of humor could come up with.

However, the day will arrive, sooner than most of us expect, I think, when web editors become as ubiquitous and easy to use as word processors. People won't need to know when to use <p> and when to use <br />, or the difference between block and in-line elements, any more than you need to know today how Word stores all its bits and bytes on the disk. And no one will care how "efficient" the final product is, either, just like they don't care how many bytes Word uses to bold some text, because computers and hard disks will continue to obviate the need for efficiency. Programmers don't code in C/C++ because it's more efficient than machine language for the computer, but rather because it's more efficient for the human.

Of course, it's important to note that today's word processors make it much easier to write, but they still do very little to make it easier to write WELL. For all the advances made in the twenty years since WordStar, Word and WordPerfect still can't write a decent short story or poem. And FrontPage and Dreamweaver will probably never be able to design a good web site. The tool doesn't determine the outcome.

And, no, I'm not going to try to tell you which tool to use, meaning this question will once again have to go unanswered. :-)

JimWorld Gazette #215: Where Everybody Knows Your Name

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