Category: Geeks r Us
OK. I want to make a website, but don't know what to write about. Has anyone got any ideas? I want to make something that people will be interested in really.
Who are the people you want to visit your website?
You need to define your audience before deciding what to put on your website.
If you want your website to be of interest to people who have several different interests, and you wish to appeal to different audiences, it needs to be properly divided and easy for people to find the areas they want.
You imply that you want to have a lot of writing on your website. From this I assume that you want the website to be informative. If that is correct, not only should you have pages that have information on them that doesn't need to be updated, but you should include information that will need to be regularly updated. If you update the website regularly, people will visit for the new information.
Remember you are one individual. You can only do so much on your own and you don't want to be devoting your entire life to one website. So make sure that you don't create something that is too big for you to keep up-to-date.
I currently work on a website committee, managing part of a website for visually impaired people in my local area. If you need any further assistance from somebody who isn't a geek, you can consult me if you want to.
That's true. You really need a goal and a website to help achieve that goal, rather than have a website and a struggle to find things to put on it. You did imply writing... are you looking to create some sort of blog? Do you want to make it interactive in some way? Do you want to provide content to download? etc? Work these things out to start with.
Well I had several ideas really. I thought of maybe making one abbout technology like for visually impaired people and that, but then there's loads already about that. I also thought of maybe making an interactive one like one of those online pets games, but with text as well as just the graphics, seeing as I've seen some that don't give very good description. OK ... That probably doesn't make much sense, but they're just a few ideas I had, so don't know what to do really.
Well, for graphics, that's just a problem with their HTML and setting tags. I agree with senior here though.
Heck, if you can gather all the braille tables for different countries, associated screen reader translation tables and make a search feature so that one can look up how a given symbol, unicode or ascii, is displayed in a given language or character set, that'd be a geeky but damn useful web site.
I am half tempted to set out to do this myself as it is awfully hard to find all this information out without buying Duxbury or some such.
You'd have to have advanced computer skills to do an accessible pet's game website.
You'd have to have a different page for people who aren't logged in which could focus on encouraging them to sign up, then when people are logged in you may want to have an accessibility menu, followed by links to the animals owned by the user. The homepage may display recent activity on the website and feature a random pet.
On the pet profile, there'd have to be links to a store for users to buy things for their pets, and games which users could play to earn points which would be used to buy things.
The store would have to have obvious divisions (food, habitat, etc).
On all pages there would have to be links to the games and store sections so that people could navigate easily.
Perhaps in the games section there could be games between specific users for points as well as individual games.
How would you keep making people come back? Perhaps there could be email alerts for when the pet is hungry etc. These would have to be managed so that people weren't having their inboxes cluttered with emails about an online pet.
I know I would have to learn probably PHP coding as well as HTML to make my web site if I was to make a pets game one. I would also have to get an e-mail thing set up so people can keep track of their pets and things if they aren't logged into the website. The more I think aout this idea, the more I want to carry it through. Well I still need to learn some PHP first and probably install some stuff so I can see my web pages offline, like when I'm not on the internet at the time of writing my web pages.
Not necessarily. If you use a CMS provider, they may build the email capability and some of the other features you want into the website. There would be a cost though.
If you want a website like that to be successful there will probably be a cost anyway because you will need somebody else on board when you're unavailable if it takes off.