COMM 260 Lecture Synopsis Three

COMM 260, Principles of Internet Web-Based Design
Instructor: Ross Collins

Lecture Synopsis Three: Web site planning: funding and community

Most organizations consider funding as part of their web site plan. Some sites are not designed to make money; others are designed to bring in some revenue, or make a profit. Revenue may come from several sources:

Advertising and subscriptions, the traditional publication model. Some sites offer some content for free, asking people to pay for "premium content."
Advertising, no subscriptions. The equivalent of free-distribution publications.
Licensing content. Works if you have content another web site owner really wants to use.
Paid placement. A high-traffic web site may be able to persuade others to include a logo-style link.
Fees for "click-through." Each time someone chooses that link, you get a fee, sort of like a referral program.
Savings. A web site is cheaper than many kinds of publications, offering income through more money kept in the business.

Many webmasters hope to build a community around their web site. To do this designers need to build a sense of community hoping users will feel part of a group. This gives site managers the opportunity to create a destination web site, a support-group web site for a product or service, a home for people who espouse a cause, or another way to sell stuff.

Communities can be established four ways:

Through a chat space. This is tough, though, unless you can bring in a celebrity to attract chatters, unless you can force users to come to a chat because they're enrolled in a web-based class, or unless you have at least 25,000 unique daily users on your site.

Through a message board. This is asynchronous, that is, people don't see messages posted as they are typing. Unless it's a class, you need 2,500 unique daily users to make this work.

E-mail discussion groups, or "Listservs" (brand name of the program). Popular with professional organizations, although they'll have to take an extra step to visit a web site.

E-mail newsletters. Popular among commercial organizations, although, again, users may not actually visit your site.