Content vs speed

Posted by multippt

Speedily updating a site is a nice way of getting visitors to stay on your site, however don’t let that be a priority. Updating a site often is not a feasible thing to do if you are working alone. Rather, you should “invest” or venture into other areas that are able to get you a sustained amount of visitors.

Speed alone (i.e. news)

While updating a site steadily will net you a steady stream of visitors more easily than any other method, it’s the updating that takes the most out of you. Blogs are a popular example - update it frequently, and people are bound to find it, somehow or rather. However, it takes a significant amount of updating to get people to return to the site.

Content alone

Having quality content is an important ingredient for any site. However, quality content is hard to come by, and takes a lot of work, simply because you can’t make “quality content” in just a day - it takes accumulation of all that hard work. Did Wikipedia went public when it is nearly empty? No. Wikipedia was popular because it contained great and complete content.

Wikis usually seem to fare better in search engines than any other site (unless the site itself is a search engine or a tool). This is because Wikis are briming with information and organized in a way that almost everything in it is considered quality in the eyes of anyone (e.g. Wikia and all its Wikis are a good example).

Tool and Software alone

Tools tend to keep visitors better if it is incredibly useful. Search engines and traffic trackers fall under this category. Statcounter proved itself that giving out a free service doesn’t always mean they won’t gain anything. Google and Yahoo are another example. However, in order to make an incredible tool, you need plenty of time, and experience.

Similarly, software is a traffic magnet as well. Firefox is a huge magnet of traffic, drawing those who had enough with Microsoft. However, making the software itself ain’t good enough. Updates should follow every piece of thing you work with, otherwise people will get bored playing with version 1.0. Firefox didn’t stay at 1.0, it continued right up to 2.0.10. That’s a whole lot of updating.

Projects are another possible source of traffic. Sourceforge make advertising certain large scale projects easier, to the extent that the traffic generated is sustainable in the long run (e.g. the eMule torrent client). But, that’s for large projects only. Small projects do not fare well in this, and they do not last long in the spotlight.

Combo?

Combinations are great, but they can be pretty messy at times. It might be a good opportunity to split up different sections of your site into strictly independent areas. You can’t have a news site and a download site together, you have to have them separate. It’s like a rule and almost everyone have attempted to put them into a strictly isolated area (e.g. CNET splitting news.com.com and download.com from each other, and QuickJournal making a site dedicated to downloading stuff featured in its multiple blogs).

It’s a matter of preference and the amount of resources you have. But do try to create more than one area of your site worth visiting.