Saturday, March 13, 2010

Make your homepage like a Facebook profile

Would you rather throw a rock at the billboard or tell the CEO that the product sucks?
Your website can no longer be static (like a freakin' billboard), it must be dynamic to give rise to a community... or civilization should I say nowadays?

The online population is getting bigger, back in the old days when you had anywhere from 50 to 10,000 daily/weekly visitors that continuously came back to your website, you called them a community.

Now that we have hundreds of millions of people online, more and more people with the same interests get attracted to the same websites. Some websites are starting to have their own little countries online.

Look at Facebook, it no longer is a community, but more like a civilization bigger than the United States.

If your website is just static pages that link to each other and might have a shoutbox to the side, you are wrong!

If you are a step ahead and have forums, you are now recently wrong.

Make your homepage look and function like a Facebook profile
Your website should look and function like a Facebook profile does. Yes! Do it now! This is the next generation web design structure, take it from me: a web developer.

Make your website as dynamic as a social networking profile.

Put a "wall" (like on Facebook) in the middle of your home page, let people drop by and say "hey watz ^ i like ur product" or "**** you and I hope you burn in ****, I call this false advertisement!" (Make sure to filter the posts so most of the cursing won't make it on the page, just to protect the other visitors.)

Let people "like" or "dislike" a news post, a product or other people's response. Let them sign up (as easily and quickly as possible) and put their pictures up so every post they make on the homepage will have their pictures next to what they are saying.

Hell, you know what? Make your website look like this as much as you possibly can:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&ref=ts&gid=291426522683

This is a group that I recently (as of the time of this post) have made to spread the word about the American tradition of having cheese at parties. Nevermind about that though, just look at the page as how your website should look like and function.

Is your website dynamic? Plastic? Is it simple and easy?
Take everything on that Facebook group page that I showed you and transform it to fit your product or purpose and then add on to it whatever you wish. Be creative and dynamic.

Merge as many of your pages in one page if you can, most people run broadband connections. Even our cell phones are running on fast 3G networks nowadays, soon to be 4G. Be creative, merge your pages.

Web designing troubles
If you do not have enough website designing/engineering experience and do not have enough time to learn, then outsource to web designers out there trying to make some extra cash; anywhere from $50 to $500 can get you a freelancer. You can also hire a web designer if you have the funds to do so, which would be great!

After you have a freelancer who has read the description of what you need and agreed on the price, show him/her pictures (as best as you can draw) of what you are wanting to see and give him/her descriptions of what sort of functions you need (like: users to sign up quickly with e-mail and name, add a picture and make quick posts and so on). Hell, give him/her that link to the Facebook group I showed you and tell 'em how to change it and make it fit your needs; it does not matter much as long as you get the results you need.

Do not let your inability to program a website stop you from putting your great ideas on your website! Ask for help! Buy help! Get it for exchange of service! Whatever! Just do it!

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