Web advice

Okay, Kitty explained things to me. What neither of us know how to do is to ananymize my information. I clicked on the link and did see my information plastered up there. That is kind of a bummer. Does it cost money to hide my info? Isn't my info pretty much out there for anybody who knows where to look, anyways? I mean a good hacker should be able to find anything, right?

So far Bravenet has been reliable, easy to use, and quick. My wife used GoDaddy for her own website and is unhappy, although I don't know why. I guess we will have to wait until we get more serious traffic to find out how it holds up. I'll keep you posted.

I didn't know what you meant by a more static home page until Kitty explained it to me, but I know what you mean. I know a lot of pages are like that, but I'm actually doing what you recommended later in the email which is copying a website I really like. If you go to dailypaul.com you will see I am almost copying it to a T. It's a working model with a lot of success, user friendly. I am hoping I can get the anarchist crowd, and those interested in it, to visit my website as religiously as I, and many other people, do for dailypaul.com.

As far as content is concerned, I don't really have that down yet. I need to get bare minimum one or two new blog articles in per day. That's difficult unless I want to sacrifice quality for quantity, which I don't. Actually, I am hoping that a large part of the website's activity will come from people participating in the forum section. Although I don't really know how to get that kick started.

One thing I am worried about, or should I say, don't understand, is how a website gets started. You know, once you have a critical mass of people going there everyday and participating in the blogs and forum, then you are just interested in getting more people there. The problem I see, at the beginning when somebody new comes to look at the website, sees there is no discussion going on in the forum or the blogs, and then leaves never to return. I think of an analogy of kick starting a dirt bike. Getting started is difficult, keeping it going is cake. So really, what I am worried about most is getting people to get things started. Any advice?

How do you feel about the SMF forum? Does it fit well with the website? Or does it make things difficult and uninviting? Ideally, I would like to have had a setup like dailypaul, where a user's registration for the forum is the same as the front page blogs, and content from the forum is transferred over to the blog. But Wordpress makes that pretty much impossible. The reason I didn't do it like dailypaul is because they use drupal and wrote their own code for everything, which was way over my head.

Anyways, looking forward to more of your advice. Thanks again.