I need opinions.

[Matt Graham]

From: Michael Butash <michael at butash.net>
> Whatever such you intend for them to do once there, you first
> need to drive people there, meaning you need to be found, and
> not immediately closed as irrelevant.

> Pick out a theme, just don't go crazy and make it myspace-ish
> with nauseating graphics everywhere.  Then look up "search 
> engine optimization" and dig to get it out there.

Pretty good advice there.  SEO:  make sure the meta tags for description and
keywords are correct/relevant, make sure you're using <h1> appropriately, make
sure robots.txt allows various search engines to look at your site.

Also, don't go overboard on trying to be (like this on Spacebook!)
hyper-relevant and/or more (+1 this on Googel!) socially connected than (bleat
this!) every other site since it can get (crow202Spot this!) annoying.  Also
also, if you have popup, popunder, sound-using, or screen-taking-over ads on
your site, people will want to hunt you down and beat you with a bag of
doorknobs instead of spending time at your site.
 
> Tough part is giving someone a reason to stay around your site - one 
> page won't do that, let alone sell a cause.

Getting people to visit one page isn't insanely difficult.  Getting people to
*explore* a site or visit it regularly seems to require one or more of:

* regularly updated interesting text or images
* a reasonably active user community that posts comments and aren't all
complete raving jerks
* a product for sale that people actually want
* pictures of nearly-naked cute people

...at least that's what I've seen.  

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see