[Theforum] Inviting other people

[Daniel J. Cody]

i see where you're coming from 100%.

it would be cool to get more people on thelist, and i'm all for that - for
the right reasons. the right reasons to get people on thelist is to help
them out with web dev stuff and promote exchanges of ideas and
knowledge. i'm sure thats everyones else reasonings here too :)

that said, we're already the largest web-dev list out there(AFIAK) with
2500+ people. how did *those* people find out about thelist in such huge
numbers without a prominant promotion(woo0! ;) on our main site? probably
through word of mouth from other web dev folks.

i remember a time(and still see it at times these days) that we had to
tell people on thelist that we had a website full of articles, etc! the
situation was completely reversed: we had more people on thelist who
didn't know about thesite. these days we have more people visiting thesite
who don't know about thelist.

i'm not saying i have an answer here for anything btw :)

maybe i am ;)

i think we should rely on peer-to-peer communication to let people know
about thelist, just like you did madhu. an honest recommendation from a
web-development peer means a lot more than a "JOIN OUR LIST" announcement
on our front page. that said, i'd be against pimping thelist in any
obtrusive way. i realize the sidebar is getting full too..

when we start focusing on exclusive promotion of one part of the evolt
realm(dare i say, 'experience'? :), we start taking away from the other
parts of the evolt realm. we should be finding ways to
leverage(ugh) traffic to our website to inform and advocate *ALL* the
other parts of evolt, IMO. not just thelist. directory.evolt.org for
example is a greatly underutalized portion of our site IMO.

at any rate, i hope this doesn't sound like an arguement or anything,
thanks for bringing it up, lets keep talking about it :)

.djc.

On Mon, 19 Nov 2001, Madhu Menon wrote:

> At 09:45 PM 11/19/2001, Daniel J. Cody opined:
> >the archive.. it's not *huge* but for the short time we had it working
> >last spring, it was probably sending 10-20 people a day to the archives,
> >which is A Good Thing(tm)..
> 
> But Dan, (and I've already pointed this out in private email), many people 
> aren't even *aware* that there's a list that goes with the site. Evolt.org 
> is known on the Web, but thelist isn't.

> ...simply (and drastically cut down) the language, and then find a 
> prominent place for it on the home page. That sidebar is so clogged it's 
> not funny.