Part of the reason I maintain my own website is to practice and refine my skills in developing web content for specific audiences, and bringing those audiences to the content. I started writing for the web in 1995, with a handful of pages about CD recording for the Adaptec site. I already had experience with hypertext, thanks to the CD version of our book, "Publish Yourself on CD-ROM," that I had produced in 1992 to go along with the book.*

For me, growing a website was (and is) a process of constantly looking for and responding to feedback. By monitoring Usenet groups where CD recording was discussed, and our own online discussion group, I could quickly see what issues, concepts, and features people were having trouble with, and write a newsletter article and/or a webpage to clarify. My rule of thumb was that, if I had to answer the same question three times, it was time to write something.

My personal website doesn't have to support customers for high-tech products, but I'm interested in building up site traffic, partly for my ego, partly in hopes of getting freelance work based on what people see on my site (a strategy that is finally beginning to pay off, to my delight). So I've had to consider what my site is about, and where to find people who would like to read it.

One obvious audience is foreigners interested in Italy, either as tourists or because they live here. There are many sites and discussion groups catering to this crowd, some of which I visit regularly. I don't do "hit and run" advertising for my site - that would be rude. Instead, I participate when I have something useful to say, and I make sure that every message includes my signature and URL (website address). If I have a page that answers a specific question, I direct people to that page, just as I used to do with technical questions about CD recording. And, just as I used to do for CD-R, I've developed pages and written articles to answer some frequently-asked questions.

Like any good webmaster, I use site traffic reports to tell me which pages are most popular on my site and how people found them. My hosting service provides this for free and, obsessive geek that I am, I check it every day. Sometimes I can tell that mentioning a certain page on a certain discussion group has brought visitors, other days I get a spike of traffic for no obvious reason. I've also gotten traffic spikes by sharing articles with more popular sites such as http://www.escapeartist.com

Soon after I launched the site at its straughan.com address (last March), I registered it with search engines (Google and Yahoo, primarily). It took until June for them to get to me, and since then my site statistics also report what people were searching for that brought them to my site (people look for the darnedest things, but that's another story). Traffic from both Google and Yahoo increases monthly, and traffic from all sources is increasing overall. Which is nice proof that I still know a thing or two about managing websites. ; ) 

* I used a few ideas from that work on the website. One important element of both was the glossary. When you're writing about a technical subject, you have to use some technical jargon, which you can't assume that everyone understands. And, when you write hypertext, you can't assume that it's going to be read in a linear fashion, so "define it the first time it appears" doesn't work; the definition needs to be available from any point in the text.

For the website, my dream was to have every occurrence of a glossary word highlighted, so that you could click on it and get a pop-up definition. I saw a site once that had this, plus, if you already knew all the jargon and found the highlighting distracting, you could turn it off. I never had the budget to do anything that sexy. But our glossary was a living, growing part of the site throughout my tenure at Adaptec/Roxio, and many people used it (as I knew from site traffic reports). It was even stolen for several other sites, a sincere - if irritating - form of flattery.

I included a glossary in every manual that I wrote, and, in the online help version of the documentation, linked every occurrence of relevant words for instant lookup. The CD recording glossary appears to have been dropped in the latest software from Roxio, and the website now only has a glossary relating to DVD. Pity.