DrivingEnthusiast.net

Here are some lessons learned for those of you who publish both a website and a blog (or multiples of each). I've been struggling with this particular challenge for the past year and have made some progress with it.

When I created the original site in 1999, I was publishing information using the classic “HTML” method: I created a page or set of pages every time I wanted to add some information to the site.

But then blogging came along, and a paradigm shift took place in the type of information you are publishing, and how you publish it to the web:

– Blogs tends to be short writings; probably including a couple of images (anything longer still goes into the "traditional" site). Some are insignificant topics, but most contain worthwhile information that:

o serves to hold the continuing interest of existing readers by keeping them “fed” but also by providing a valuable set of information for their reference

o attract and retain new readers - the information you’ve published to date acts to establish your “credentials” on the particular topic.

– Blogging publishes information using special software – different from the software you used to create your site. Blogging software doesn’t add this information to your site in the traditional way, with a hierarchical set of trees that your readers can browse “up” and “down”. AKA the folders you had established for various topics and the ability to navigate up and down these trees and browse thru the available pages. That ability was the original purpose of HTML. Now that information is being put on your site using two distinct methods and in two distinct forms.

At some point you realize that you have reached a new milestone. As time went along, the majority of new information you are publishing is housed in blogs and not in the traditional (easily browsed) fashion.

And then you realize that you have a new problem. Large quantities of information that would be of interest to your readers is submerged in past postings. That means that:

– it’s hard to browse thru these postings to spot an item of interest

– it’s even harder to locate specific information a reader is looking for.

Bottom line, if readers didn't see the blog post when you originally published it, information of value is probably lost to them forever.

Your challenge is to help your readers find that information.

I've implemented a couple of things to help address this challenge.

Categorizing Postings

As of this writing, I have 1,919 postings. Categories split them up to separate topics. The master category “Driving Enthusiast” has all 1,919 postings. Everything else is a subset. A subset helps the reader locate only topics of interest to them. Some topics are oil and water – Ford readers do not want to read about BMW, for example. I’m actually going back through old postings and re-categorizing them. You’ll notice I’ve recently added three new sub-categories, and others are under consideration. Each of the items below have their own RSS feed, but more importantly each also be indexed using the methods I describe below.

Indexes of Past Blogs

I’ve provided two methods on my site that readers can use to browse old blogs (and discover items of interest):

The first method is a calendar (provided by the blogging software) function. You simply click on any date that has an underlined hyperlink and you go to the postings made on that date. If you have enough patience and use a lot of clicks, you can go back in time all the way to the first blog posting I ever made – dated in 1945. Obviously this is not an efficient way to browse thru really old postings… but if you’ve missed a couple of days it’s an easy way to look thru them.

The second is much better. This allows you to see the titles (hyperlinks) of all past postings – but just by category. Descriptive titles catch the attention of the reader. Clicking on the hyperlink then brings up the post of interest.

My blogging software didn’t provide all of it the second method. The software has an optional user-written add-on that creates index of prior postings by category. I’m simply pointing to the files it creates, which are unreachable otherwise.

Searching Old Posts

Indexes take you to the posts themselves, but aren’t searchable. To implement a searching function, lacking that as a built-in feature from my ISP, I implemented Google for searching my site.

Two benefits here:

– Google understands search terms better than anything else I might have implemented. The dependency here is that obviously Google has had to index the entire site. There are several methods that can be used to get Google to do that – otherwise a search would turn up blank.

– Any search terms that anybody enters gets saved and sent to me periodically in a report. Then I can look thru these search terms and adjust my site (keywords on pages, metanames, etc). This is an art that needs to be learned and there are lots of sites that explain it.

Dependencies

– That Google has indexed your site

– That you haven’t radically changed your site, thus rendering all of the Google indexes obsolete. There is no explicit way to make Google index or re-index your site on a specific schedule or at a specific time – you can only influence the odds that it will happen. So, stick with a consistent directory structure for your site, learn how to influence Google, tailor your site and keywords to Google.

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The Irony

I started this site as a personal website, originally to publish a few images of my car but also to learn about the web phenomena and how the internet worked. This is amateur publishing – and a lot of folks tried this in the mid-to-late nineties when personal websites “took off” and the first set of tools came onto the market.

8 years later, my site remains a personal site. There is no commercial interest here, no staff except myself and certainly no income.

However, because of the sheer amount of information I’ve added to the site, I’ve had to learn a lot of lessons and develop several methodologies to keep the site

– going (retaining readers)

– growing (attracting new readers – growth is what the web is all about)

– manageable (allowing me to publish information with minimal impact on my time).

For what my site has become, amateur publishing doesn’t cut it any longer. Given the size of my site I’ve had to develop quasi-professional techniques to manage all of the information and present it in a format that is easy to browse and search.

This wasn’t my original intent; instead it’s where I’ve been forced to go. That also means it takes more and more of my time to keep the site going, so I need great tools:

– Microsoft FrontPage - it would have been impossible to get here without it and it would be impossible to manage the site without it.

– Radio Userland. It’s sometimes more than a little fickle, but when it works it’s powerful and easy to use. Biggest issue I have is that it does not have a spell checker, and my posts are the worse for it.

But I’m not a professional website developer… and the site does reflect that fact. Nor will I ever be one. I am in the software and hardware industry, but this is just a peripheral interest to me.

Nonetheless, how am I doing?

For a personal website, I’d rate myself a 9.5. With all the work I’ve done, without any outside help, this is clearly at the top of personal “amateur” sites.

As a professional site, if it were one, I’d rate this as a 1.5. A professional – commercial – site needs strong focus on money making, and I’ve only scratched the bare surface of that. It also needs professional design and graphics, and I’ve never attained any level of professionalism there at all. I have zero graphics arts ability, and I have never gone thru a single design review session on the function of the site (although I do know how to do that from my days as a software developer). I might one day attain a “3” if I focus on these two areas, but it’s unlikely that I’d have the time to totally redesign the site to support that.

I did attend a session about 10 years ago when I was at Microsoft that covered how MSNBC.com worked and how stories were entered. That’s pretty much standard stuff for professional sites these days. It starts with tying the database to a relational database. I know how to do that, but then I would lose the easy functionality of FrontPage. So, instead it’s likely that I’d use a database to store my movie listings rather than drive the entire site.

I also need to use CSS to govern the entire site. Theoretically, I could change the colors and fonts on the entire site at once with a simple change in one place. I will at least try to move to a CSS-governed site using some of the new functionality in Microsoft Expression Web (the next version of FrontPage). I have that product, I was in the beta test of it, and I have some material covering it better coming to me next month. CSS exploitation will be a small but important step in the development of the site.

I also think that I could tie the blogs and sections of the site better together. For example, clearly a Ford blog should correspond to the Ford section – and I have one of each. The Ford section contains substantial (thousands web pages and images) material. But there are some blogs –such as Automotive Humor – which don’t need a corresponding web section. And there are some blog topics such as BMW, for which I don’t have any substantial website material and likely never will.

So, in summary – good work for an amateur site, a couple of important things I could do to take it to a more professional level. But it will remain a personal site.

Hopefully these lessons learned will help readers find success in their own sites…

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