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One
of the faster ways to build traffic to your site is to maintain
not one site... but several. It
does seem counter intuitive, why spread yourself thin? But
it works because of the way search engine spiders operate
(see: Search Engines).
Spiders follow links. Back and forth. They do not follow links
very far down. In most cases a spider will only find the top
level of your domain, nothing under it.
Maintaining a design tone allows
you to set a template, as it were, for your site, and carry
it across multiple sites quickly and easily. Let's take a
look at the anatomy of the Gateway sites as an example.
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GatewaytoVermont.com
is the site we'll begin on. Please understand that
we could begin anywhere, on any site, because each site
feeds back into the next.
The sites are laid out to look
decent on a monitor set to 800x600 px. You may have
yours set higher, and observe a fair amount of white
space. You may be set lower, and think the site is chunky.
AOL uses 800x600 as their default, and the traffic reports
tell me "most" viewers are using this setting. |
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Under
the Gateway sites are
travel guides. Laid out using the same basic structure
as the Gateways it is easy to see the sites are maintained
by the same firm... and easy for the firm to quickly
populate the pages as new attractions come on the scene.
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On the same "level" which
is to say, linking off the index page, is the
Wedding Guide.
Each guide maintains the same design elements, but
has a unique tone to match its content. |
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Even the subwebs, such as the pages for
RagTag Golden Retriever Rescue, The
Farm, even The
Chicken Pages, maintain the same overall design
elements.  |
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 WoolandFeathers.com
and CabinCam
share design elements for no other reason than it was
faster and cheaper to reuse already created graphics.
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Want to see more? We have catalogs..
or more examples of webs
Additional Articles:
Investing In You: Budgeting for a Website
The Web Worksheet: Designing Your
Site
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brochure sites 
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to OrbWeaver's Business Resource Lab