The Internet Archive’s way back machine shows the BWebCentral.com website since early in 2006. Though the concept and the idea have gone back as early as 1999, only the domain was purchased around 2006. Until it’s recent transformation to a Drupal site, the site itself was never much on presentation, it was about generating and syndicating content. But what goods is a lot of syndicated content if no one is heading to your site to view it?
I continued to wonder, what if large groups of people made my site their home page? What would make someone change their homepage to my site? The answer to this question is not content, but many people think it is. Huge numbers of people change their homepage to Google, and clearly that can’t be because of presentation, it’s just one image and a search box. It’s not really “content” either since Google doesn’t really have much content of it’s own. It’s because of the search box of course, the “promise” of content in a simple and easy to use interface. People tend to covet what they choose to make as their homepage and do not typically change this decision.
To be popular in cyberspace continues to remain the same as it did in the old days and takes only two things a) Patience (time) and b) Imagination. The sites that persist and grow day after day, year after year become popular . The sites and blogs that die out, will end. Like Field of dreams, “if you build it [they] will come”. Only it won’t be immediately. It will be over time. Sometimes I long to be one of those first websites, boards or mailing lists, which stand the test of time and continue to have millions of users today. Starting up today could take 10+ years to build a following, and even then there is no guarantee, meanwhile I just sit back, and play around with both content and presentation and hope to hit the Google Lottery.
Some people will tell you that the secret to success is to get your site listed in the top google search rankings for varoius keywords. But in reality, this is only a small part. From time to time one of the pages in my site will get a high google ranking and I will be flooded with lots of traffic. But eventually your ranking will fluctuate and unless you did something ‘magic’ to keep your visitors to your site, your traffic will disappear as quickly as google re-ranks you. Once you’re getting traffic, the real question is how to do you keep it? How can you ensure your users keep coming back to you site over and over? To answer this question, think about some of your favorite websites and ask yourself, what attracts you to them? What makes you return?
