DigitalNovelists.com gets serious

I like the new look! Shows how many of us there are and encourages people to look around.

Very nice, ML!

I like the changes! Especially the latest updates - most with teasers - instead of just a list of authors. So much more engaging!

I did catch one thing, on the http://www.digitalnovelists.com/why page:
"3) Paid. This plan is $15/mo by PayPal subscription, with a $15 set-up fee. THE SET-UP FEE IS RISING TO $15/MO ON 1/1/10."
Either the second or the third sentences needs a correction.

Looks great! The excerpts/links are very user-friendly and a good taste to whet the appetite of any readers who come your way.

Two suggestions, both graphic-related:

- The logo and especially the header are awfully generic, with no info about reading or writing or really anything except an internet address. All that tells me is: "hi! we're online!" Which I could've guessed by the fact that I'm viewing it in a browser.

- The nekkid lady in the Digital Network Blog Ads is a turnoff. Well... in fairness I suppose she's a turn-on to straight men and lesbians, heh. But I just mean the image takes away from the overall universality and simple elegance of the site. Since you're looking for something welcoming to readers, I think you risk making them think this is some kind of erotica site. Might as well have one of those horrid Evony ads! "Take me, my lord!"

Otherwise, nicely done. Best of luck to you guys.

Yeah, the DN Blog Network ad will be changing soon.

There is no logo; what's there is just styled text. I'm getting a logo from Irk as soon as she recovers from Louisiana.

"Something new to read every day." (So far, completely accurate, in spades! Here's hoping everyone keeps updating like this!)

I'm seriously thinking of going up from weekdays to every day once ak is finished and I just have PA going. Probably shorter posts, at least on the weekends. Get my readers totally hooked on a daily fix.

I'm beginning to think short/frequent beats long/infrequent. I was thinking of re-posting the History once a week in 2k chunks, but I may break it up into twice a week 1k chunks. Man, I don't even know if that's possible, though! The Gulch might be divisible, since most of the scenes are brief. This week's episode was the first where only one set of interactions took place.

One thing that the "why writers should host with DN" is missing is cold, hard stats. If you can spit out average site views or most popular story views per week, or comments/week, or something like that, that would really add muscle to your sales pitch. I've found stats basically nonexistent (while concern/worry about them everpresent) in the short time I've been in webfic.

This is a good idea, especially if you can show some proof that users are frequently migrating from one DN-hosted site to the next.

I've only JUST started promoting the cluster. The "migration from one site to the other" business is moot right now, as the sites aren't properly hooked up. That's what I'm working on at present. I'm not entirely sure how I can measure, either, without getting all up in everyone's Analytics. Everyone's servers are treated as individual, with their own log files, etc, and I'm not a good enough admin to know how to aggregate all that together to spit out data. (It's not something I've had to worry about, mooshing data up from more than one server.)

The main "why" up until now has been that the tools are all in one place rather than scattered hither and thither. The second "why" has been that it's a free service once you pay the set-up fee, and that fee is reasonable in the extreme. After that, it's been up to the individual writers; I've been doing it as a sort of mitzvah (on average, I've made less than $25/mo on the entire group of sites, minus my own), and quite honestly, I'm not really looking to grow the cluster. If it grows, it grows. If it doesn't, it doesn't. It's not likely to be a profit center at any size.

But I want the people who *are* in the group to get as much out of it as possible, and I hope that starting something like this will help get attention for everyone, not just those of us in the group. Maybe competing services will arise. That's also good for everyone.

Promotional benefits of the cluster as I see it is collective advertising opportunities, i.e. we all kick in and maximize our exposure through economies of scale.

In terms of attractiveness of site, it's an easy and inexpensive way to have a professional-looking one.

In terms of how well your work is going to succeed beyond first attracting readers, that has a lot more to do with your work than what service or platform you use.

Hey, I'm not trying to say that DN sucks eggs or anything. I'm just saying that IF you provided that sort of service THEN people looking to make a move would be blown away. At least, I would be.

I get the major thrust that you've made so far. Not everyone wants to learn how to mess around with setting up their own site( or maintaining them. We only have 24 hours in the day and for many people, it's just not worth doing that with their time.

As far as generating the stats, here's an idea.

People are pretty protective of their stats, so maybe you could defray that concern by writing something into the hosting contract, that their stats will be used to calculate DN-wide statistics anonymously, with no exposure on their part. Y'know, like those anonymous surveys that we see so often.

Once you have their permission, you could concatenate all the log files each day and run them through a log analyzer. That would take care of the hits, and perhaps you might also get a good stab of comments out of it, too, depending on how Drupal does comments. This should be able to be done as a UNIX script, so it shouldn't be difficult.

Anyhow, I'm sure there are many ways to skin the cat. The only reason for me bringing it up really was the statement on the site that DN was for writers who wanted to be read who were looking for their true 1000 fans. I'd like that but everything I'm seeing out here in webfic land seems to require more time and effort than it's possible for one person who is otherwise employed to give. Thus, I was looking for a concrete assurance that DN could help me out with that.

Got it. Real Soon Now, I hope DN can do exactly that. We're amassing a nice little war chest for a PW campaign, I'm finally getting a proper logo, and I'm going to kick in (really rather expensive) ad space on my nonfiction properties. That plus the drop downs should help a lot. I'll think about running a cron to concatenate files and running something like Webalyzer against them.