How To Support a Website
I have to admit, posting this is kind of selfish of me. I’m hoping that people will take my advice and apply it here…
Fortunately, though, the advice here doesn’t only apply here. It can be used for almost any website, especially those websites that provide information as their primary product. In fact, there is only one difference between how to support an information website and how to support a product-based website.
Alright, that’s enough rambling off-topic from me… On with the on-topic rambling!
Why You Would Support a Website
I really don’t recommend supporting just any website that you see on the Internets. First, you should ask if supporting the website will help you in any way. Ask yourself, are you ever coming back for any reason? If you say yes, then it is time to consider giving some support. Making a website is cheap… Technically savvy people can make a ‘free’ website, simply by using their own existing computer and the same internets connection that they would be paying for anyways for their private uses. I don’t recommend this, even for technically savvy people, because home-based computers and internets connections aren’t reliable enough, and if something goes wrong, you’re the only one to blame. (I hosted the precursor to this site on my home computer for a year, and I’d gladly pay someone else to manage the connection issues.)
Even with how cheap it is to create a website, it still has a cost. That connection to the internets still costs money, even if a person would pay for it anyways, and keeping a server running and connected eats up valuable time. Maintaining and updating the website itself also takes time, which could be used in creating a personal business or in advancing a career. In the early stages, a website eats up a lot of money, both in terms of maintenance costs and in terms of opportunities lost from spending time doing the maintenance yourself.
So, if you want a website to continue to exist, it makes sense to support it. If you want the website to improve, then it makes even more sense to support it. I know that I can definitely use the money, after messing up my finances these past couple of weeks. (Payday is today, and with our bills, and a complete lack of savings (which we could have had, if I didn’t eat out for lunch during the week, or if I hadn’t bought my wife the rug she wanted), we’ll have $14 to spend on groceries over the next two weeks. Yeah, I messed up big time.)
Once a website is profitable (i.e., a person can make more money maintaining their website than working at a traditional job), the improvements start to cascade… Now that the maintainer no longer has to balance their time precariously, updates and improvements can happen a lot more quickly.
So, here are five things that you can do to support a website:
Do Not Click the Ads
That’s right, I said don’t click them… It may sound contrary to the purpose of those ads, but there’s a very valid reason…
In order for advertising to work, people have to make purchases… Otherwise, the advertising becomes a hole that the manufacturer/reseller is throwing money into. If the seller isn’t making money through advertising, they drop the ad service, and the profits made by the ad company, as well as by the publishers, drop as well.
If you see an ad, and you think that there is a good chance of you making a purchase, then it is alright to click on an ad. Of course, honestly evaluate the company and product… Simply because someone has a good ad doesn’t mean that the product is right for you.
The act of clicking ads just to drive up a specific website’s profits does more to hurt everybody than it does to help that one publisher. Again, please don’t do it.
Donate
This is the one difference between a product based website and an information based website. With product based websites, simply make a purchase. Information sites, however, don’t have the luxury of having exclusive control over items… Information can be copied and distributed with very minor costs, despite its costs to make that first copy.
If you want to see more information, or see the quality of information improve, look for a donate button. (My button is at the end of each post.) The reasoning is the same as above: if a person can make enough money to survive simply by creating information, they’ll have more time and energy to work on it.
If you can’t find a donate button, find the contact form and send the webmaster a note… Few people will turn down a donation, and having direct contact with the publisher will help in other ways, as seen below.
Contribute Value
If you don’t have the money to donate, or if you recognize that donating wouldn’t be the most helpful thing that you can do ($20 would make a huge difference in my life, but would make little difference to Steve Pavlina), then find a way to improve the value of the site directly. For blogs, this could be done by leaving helpful comments or submitting articles. Most non-blog information sites also have articles, even if they do not have a way for people to comment. Try submitting articles to those sites as well. Of course, some people like having absolute creative control of their sites, so this isn’t an option everywhere, but if you recognize that a rejection to publish an article is almost never personal, it doesn’t hurt to help.
Also, if you notice a typo, make a note of it and let the webmaster know. A lot of people get turned off very quickly by typos, so by helping the webmaster become aware of them, you’re helping the site retain visitors. The same goes for broken links… If you can, spend a minute to try and find the correct link, but just letting the webmaster know that a link is wrong is often much more than a typical visitor will do. (I had the link to KL’s blog up in my blogroll for months after she took her site down, yet nobody reminded me… I learned to never assume that the webmaster knows what he’s doing, because I know that I most certainly don’t have a clue on many aspects of running a site. 
)
Talk to the Webmaster
Okay, it doesn’t have to be the actual webmaster… It can be anyone involved in the website. I just can’t fit “talk to someone involved in the production, presentation, or content of the website” in a section title.
Probably the most important piece of information that any company can have is what the customer is thinking. If the company doesn’t know what the customer wants, then the customer simply doesn’t get what they want. There are, of course, ways to tell what people reading a website like, based on traffic logs… but it most certainly doesn’t replace having clear communication with the people you want to attract.
Link
With the way that search engines currently work, it really doesn’t matter if you say something nice about another website or not. In fact, you could completely hate the site, the company behind the site, and all of their products and services, but if you link to it, you’re giving modern search engines the impression that you like that site. Each link is a vote in support… and the more people who link to a site, the more that other people see that site. The more people who see a site, the more people who link to it, whether they’re saying something positive or negative. It’s a cycle that could easily send a terrible company rocketing towards the top of the search engine rankings.
Well, just like in election booths, use your vote wisely.
Currently, I’m working on supporting sites that I like by linking to them. I really don’t have money to spare (though I have enough to live), so I can’t buy from ads or donate directly. I don’t have extra time right now either, and won’t have extra time for a few months at least, so I can’t contribute extra content to sites other than the occasion comment. I already communicate with the webmasters of various sites whose content I enjoy improving, though with my recent crunch on time, I haven’t been able to communicate as much as I would like to. The option left to me is to link to sites like Jeff’s Druid Journal, make a hearty recommendation, and hope that other people provide the support that I’m unable to give.
And yes, I do heartily recommend Druid Journal. I would tell everyone to read his archives, if I had a loud enough voice. If you don’t want to support this site, then support Jeff’s site, at least.
30 Days of Waking at 4am status:
So far, complete success as far as waking up.
On Wednesday, the 23rd of January, the first day that I woke at 4, I spent about half an hour reviewing the existing code for Time Agent.
On Thursday, I researched how to use Berkeley DB, a way to store the tasks to disk quickly and efficiently. It is perhaps the most efficient way to store data, but its learning curve might be too steep to include in the Beta release in one month. I used the full hour and a half of extra time to study examples and begin planning on how to include it in the main program.
On Friday (this morning), I began piecing together the base classes and began firming up the details for the inheriting classes. I’m still debating whether to use a singleton for the ticker portion of the panel… After all, I truly will have only one ticker. Perhaps a future feature would be multiple tickers, though, so I want to re-think this plan before wrapping other code around it. Spent a total of 45 minutes coding, because my cats would not leave me alone. Good progress despite only using half of the alloted time.
Tomorrow and Sunday, I’m looking at having much more time, since I won’t have to run off to work at 6:30. Please, don’t let me decide to turn off the alarm and roll over… Although, I am confident that the desire to get a lot of progress done will push me out of bed. That, and I’ve got canned coffee in the fridge. With the coffee, my desire to get a lot of progress under my belt, and people’s expectations that I’ll get up early, I’ll be able to get up without too much trouble.
After sunrise, though, around 7:30, I’ll be working on unpacking the remaining boxes in the garage. )
Wow, what a recommendation! What can I say? Thank you, thank you! If you, dear reader, do go over to my site, you will find links to Adam’s site scattered through it, because his site is just awesome (as you know if you’re reading it.)
Adam, I’m very interested to read about your experiments with getting up early. Since this past April, I’ve been abot 95% polyphasic, and it has worked out very well for the most part. (95% polyphasic means I took extra-long naps or full-nights-sleeps once every three weeks or so. Note I use a 3.5-hour core sleep every night.) However, my alarm has started waking up my wife, which is Very Bad. I’m thinking of switching to a silent alarm… I really hate to give up all that extra time!!
I love how “Very Bad” gets capitalized when talking about wives…
I’m not really setting out to get more waking hours in the day… It’s more accurate that I want to have more productive hours. As soon as I get home from work, as I said in Wednesday’s post, I’m completely done with programming for the day (except for today, for some strange reasons… I’m anxious to start programming right now).
I’ll definitely keep everyone up to date over this set of thirty days… both on how well I’m progressing with waking up, as well as how far I’m progressing on TimeAgent.
And to say it again, Go Visit Jeff’s Site.