The Bottom Up Internet Economy
As a web designer for small business and non profit organizations, I have to be a bit of a jack of all trades, and master of at least a few. One of the beauties of the internet is that we can scale our message back to a human level, unlike the top-down message of Corporations through traditional Mainstream Media. After all, if you’re an independent businessperson, chances are you’re wearing as many hats as I do. You also know your market and the types of problems people are looking to solve by purchasing whatever it is you’re selling. So your dialog on a website can target those things on an ongoing basis.
One of the beauties of putting small business and non-profit websites on smaller scale content management systems such as WordPress or ModX or Movable Type, or Drupal, is that the business or non-profit organization and its employees or members can create their own message, add to it, and refine it continually. Even better, this method, using commenting and other two way tools, creates a dialog with people in your website’s audience who have an interest, which allows you, as a site owner, to judge how well you’re doing, and maybe restructure your message in future to reflect the audience you find you’re actually playing to, which is sometimes different than the one you thought you’d be targeting.
Adding to a website in this way, on a regular basis, will also help in getting that content indexed in the search engines. The more the content grows the better chance a website has of finding the right audience. This is a fabulous opportunity for people who are doing unique and interesting things, since the bottom up demand of the internet lends itself well to finding those niche audiences who want what you have, whether it be a solar powered flashlight, mobiles made of recycled circuit boards, or an organization for Scrabble Players.
Sometimes starting with writing the answers to questions people have asked you in the past is the best way to start the dialog. If one person asks a question, it’s a sure bet other people have thought of the same or a similar question. Those questions, or bits and pieces of them, are often searched through Google.
Though I know a lot of different things, I don’t know how your business or organization works, nor what it does nearly as well as you do, though I’ve become pretty darn good at creating unique visual identities for small organizations. If you are given an attractive framework upon which to build your own website content, you can build a site that will reach out to a worldwide audience and present your organization in the best way for you.
Technorati Tags: Internet Economy, Website Content Management, Small Business and Non-Profit Web Design
