Glad you enjoyed my story
Ready for another novel (apologies in advance but I've tried to cover everything I could think of!)?
To Marianne's post -
Obernet is like a business to me in structure (obviously a non-profit one, I get no money from it whatsoever and want to keep it that way!), and this mentality seems to work for me. I do it coz I love it, but keep it v.strictly organised in the background. I spend 30 minutes, every day on it. Either participating, or working on something. When I run out of things to do, and there's nobody to talk to at that moment in time, I figure out something new to do - a new competition or an idea for an RPG, anything. 30 minutes isn't much, but it keeps things moving - there's no such thing as 'the next site update', because it's always, constantly being worked on.
1. Enabling anyone who wants information to
find your site and making it an enjoyable, welcoming experience.
The BIG thing has been to get ranked #1 in google for the term Obernewtyn, and #3 for Isobelle Carmody, so we can be found! You're going to hate this, but it was all by accident! I've learned more recently that Google puts a site higher when their content is a) constantly updated, with quality content, and b) referred to or commented upon by other people (and/or linked to). This enables them to ensure that the higher ranked sites contain the most accurate/quality content for the term the person has typed in, based on public opinion. I'm no expert in SEO though, it's something I'm still learning about as part of my day-job.
Once they find us - we make newbies very comfortable - where there is no question too silly, nothing that someone's not too busy to explain. The concept of the stupid n00b doesn't exist, thank god.
The forums are also hugely important - without them there would be no community. It drives itself - the most popular areas would be those where people can talk about whatever they want - yes, there's a fair amount of discussion about Isobelle's books, but there's areas of silliness/ games, or in discussion about any books, movies, tv shows, anime, plays, musicals, etc that they're interested in. Eg, the Library, one of our most popular areas:
www.obernewtyn.net/e107/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewforum.php?8 2. Keeping those members coming back.
Aside from the forums. A lot of it relies on structure that we've developed over time. Members are "customers" to me, and so we do whatever we can to keep our customers happy. People are creatures of habit. Schedules, that members(/customers) can rely on:
Monthly Events:- 1st of every month, new writing comp launched. Runs for 1 month - 6 weeks.
- 7th of every month, newsletter mailed out.
- 14th of every month, new art comp launched. Runs for 1 month - 6 weeks.
To make running/maintenance of these competitions bareable, we:
- prepare them at the beginning of the year en masse (so all we have to do is tick a button on the date and make it visible to the public). Even if the date creeps up on you, you're somewhat prepared for it.
- we ask who on the site wants to judge it. This has fantastic benefits - you don't have to trawl through loads of entries in your 'spare time', and at the same time you're giving people who want to include themselves the opportunity to be included.
Yearly Events:Things that aren't available all the time, so people look out for them. Sometimes you won't see a member (post) all year (they may have just been lurking), but then they'll turn up out of the blue for Moonfair for example.
- Mystics Ball - a (somewhat chaotic but oh so fun) RPG we run every year, for two weeks in March (yeap, it's on atm).
- Moonfair - an epic 6 weeks of competitions, that takes about 2 months to prepare for! The prep is as important as the event itself, as it involves everyone and their guilds. There's a lot of team building/team work that goes on during that time. The competitions are devised by the members; we just facilitate it by making the pages. We have forums of fortune telling and debates and team story writing - all sorts of things.
Extra non-regular events:So, surprises.
- New RPGs all during the year - maybe with a month at most gap between them. We have members organise them - if they want to host an event, they book the 'function hall' (a forum) and they host their event. It's up to them to spruke it to other members, host the entire event, moderate it, etc. We've had a LOT of success with these! We find a constant RPG gets forgotten, or tired - but a couple of weeks of a directed RPG, and then closing it off, makes people visit / participate while it's around.
- Random competitions that give them something other than guild points - such as, being printed in the back of the A-format edition of TSK (thanks to the networking connection I made with Penguin and her very generous support of us), or winning a signed copy of a book.
Almost all our events and competitions will gain participants points, that help to total toward the yearly guild point competition (that like everything else starts and ends on a definite date every year). It's much like the House point system they use in Harry Potter, now I think of it (only we honestly didn't know about that when we devised it
). Here's our info about Guilds if you're interested:
www.obernewtyn.net/e107/page.php?3You'll be amazed at the amount of time/effort members will put into something that will earn them a pretty picture someone's made (eg:
for profile, crystals are earned through completing various tasks), or a couple of points. Everyone seems to love showcasing their works. When people's creativity is on the line, they will come back to see what people think of it.
All of this stuff is advertised in the newsletter, on twitter, facebook, etc.
3. Involving members when they want to do more.
This is as simple as asking for honest - if needs be, anonymous feedback. A forum post about what people want to see on the site; a suggestion box area opening up, that allows people to comment on members suggestions too. Asking for judges, allowing them to host their own events, giving them the opportunity to run for guildleader of one of the guilds. Etc.
That said; we moderators do have an area to rant. There is always going to be a time where someone rubs you the wrong way, or posts rubbish in an area that you were working on. We have a seperate admin area where we can rave and let off steam - and ask advice of one another - so that we can deal with all weird and wonderful scenarios in a 'professional' and kind way, instead of feeling the need to vent on the person who has caused the offence. This ensures that not only the members/clients, but the mods/staff
are happy.
Another site I'll recommend - Gaiaonline. This is an online community, on steriods. I have been a member there - a quite silent one - for many years. They got so large, they went corporate. They sadly focus a lot on advertising and making money now, though, so the site has lost it's love (in my opinion) but not it's great ideas and ways of dealing with things. I get tons of ideas from the way they do things.
To Belinda's post - oh gosh...I think I'm going through the same thing with php that you are with html right now! So *hugs*. For when I started retaining it...it depended on how often I had to repeat it! I'm a big advocate for the undo command, LOL. Knowing the code that's running in the back of your website enables you to experiment - and through experimentation you'll remember more (mainly what not to do, again LOL).
Or, teaching someone. I had to explain to my best friend from school the basics of HTML and it forced me to think about how I was doing things, and research the proper terminology for things I'd just done or taken for granted. Teaching someone - even just a little - will always fast-track your own knowledge. Also - highly recommend
www.w3schools.com/ if you don't already frequent there!
HA! Love it. I might borrow your steel capped boots for our Elspeth account occasionally. We have a global main admin account, that myself and about 4 other people can access, that we use for our problem people
that way we can maintain ourselves as members, as well. Most people know
exactly who uses the Elspeth account - but they know that the account represents the body of moderators, and not just one person's views.
Worst hacking...yeah, I keep backups of everything
So do my hosts - they're wonderful - medialayer.net. I'm a huge fan of theirs.
Prior to medialayer...perhaps the most memorable hacking experience came about a week before Moonfair was due to start. We'd all been working a lot on getting the sub-site for Moonfair ready in time, everything was going according to schedule...and some kid in part of a hacking competition decided to hack us. There was no reason for it, they were just trying to get points on this hacker forum where people listed how many sites they'd broken that day. Idiots. After that happened, the host we'd been with refused to let us back on with them, insisting it was our fault somehow (the phrase "we're just a frikkin' book club!" was uttered many a time), and I had to scramble around and find another host quickly. The host I found had very poor service, and their servers were down more often than not. After them, I found medialayer, and I haven't had a problem since. We had Moonfair up in time, but it was the stress of working so hard with the team on something, and having it potentially unable to go ahead, for no reason whatsoever, that was the most stressful.
To Stellar's post: Most of the info relevant to your question would be in my first bit about enabling users to find your site.
Sign your site up for Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster tools, if you haven't already - it enables you to track your traffic, see what people are searching for / how they're finding you, and a whole bunch of other tasty free stuff.
What a difference having my forum and my site on the same system did - completely invaluable - a CMS, based on e107.org's (free) system. The forum is the most active area of any community - and hosting them at the same place as your information-areas (so, all on the one domain) enables your *entire* site to be constantly crawled by Google - not for malicious means, but because it'll help the users out there get what they want. Again, it's been unconscious doing, and has benefited all. So consider breaking free of proboards, and hosting a forum on your own site (there are many open source content management systems that'll allow this. A popular one is Wordpress, with a PHPBB integration - hugely documented, just google it. And my favourite, e107.org).
And - one of the main searches people do - is on news of Isobelle's writing. So we make sure we have news. Even if it's just a little thing - like a cover of a book being announced, or the fact that she's appearing at an artists fair in Bologna. People love to hear about what she's up to. The news is never too small to share and by sharing and it gives everyone what they want. As well as this we make sure we have lots of static info about her - an FAQ has been particularly useful, because the amount of times people type "when is the sending coming out" into google - and we have that exact phrase mentioned several times - legitimately - on the forums, and in our IC FAQ. That traffic comes straight to us. So I guess in planning, think about what term you'd type into a search engine yourself, and use that term.
There's lots of different strategies you can employ - all covered by more savvy SEO people than myself. The main trick I've found is having quality content that keeps people interested, involved and included. Everything stems from there...
Hope I haven't just bored you all to tears and this makes some sort of sense! Better go!
great to meet fellow Parrish fans!
