The circle of growthSo, Mr./Ms. Content Publisher, what do you need on your site?You need everything that is required to fully describe your project, that include feature description, use functionality, changelog, download, and all the usual features of a good project website. That's all the stuff you should do if you are using your programmer brain. Now lets do that transplant and put in the web publishers grey matter. Your site needs interactivity. It also needs size. Both are critical to building community, and community is critical to you pulling a living from your project (I'll explain more on that later.) At the DSL website we provide: a multi channel forum a wiki blogging software (Drupal) a store All of these areas are sources of content. The blog and forums are also hang out places for DSL fans and advocates. Both are tremendously valuable for several reasons. One reason is that they retain a user base on the website. That means that there is an actual community where people come to talk, and that community has grown over time. Also, the community writes, and this adds to your websites content. The content gets indexed by the search engines and then attracts more users. Some of those users will become avid fans and they will also become users of your blogs, forums, etc which add to the content of your site. Do you see how this works? The more you provide for areas of expression, the more people communicate which creates even more potential for expression; therefore, you have significant growth. Your user base also becomes your project's advocate which in turn encourages more users. See a pattern here? |