Webring Welcome Pages

Webrings are an excellent concept ... they are designed to link similar sites together. Special controls allow visitors to go from one site to another, forwards and backwards.

We found webrings soon after we began working on our site about a year ago. At first we did what everyone seems to do ... we put the webring controls directly on the home page. It soon became apparent that this would not work as the home page became too cluttered and large. Not only did it take forever to load, but all of these controls make the page look terrible.

Then I had the brilliant idea of placing all of the webring codes onto their own page titled "webrings". That worked for a while, but as I joined more webrings it became more and more awkward and took longer and longer to load. What began happening is people surfing to my site didn't stick around long enough to let the page finish loading!

This was unacceptable, as webrings are supposed to increase traffic, not scare away visitors. I split the single webring page into six and the problem seemed corrected.

As I joined more and more webrings, the problem cropped up again. And as I analyzed my traffic patterns I found an interesting phenomenon at work. Visitors from webrings reached my page, looked at the other webrings, got intrigued and left almost immediately. Again, this defeated the purpose of webrings ... to get some additional traffic.

One day I stumbled across the site of James S. Huggins.  This guy has a fantastic, well thought out site. His navigation is well done, his pages are nicely designed and his content is great and interesting.

I found his webring welcome pages and immediately knew that I had found the answer to my dilemma. Why not put one webring on each page, along with a set of related links, a short explanation of what our site has to do with the webring, and the webring controls.

So what does this mean? Someone surfing a webring runs into a webring welcome page, reads a few lines and immediately knows why he wound up on our site. The webring controls are right in front of him to allow him to continue surfing the ring. If he scrolls down a bit, he'll find links to pages within the site which may be of interest.

One small problem cropped up right away. Some webrings require specific positioning within a website. For example, webring fragments must be placed on the sign up page for the webring (if not the ring stops working), and, in this case, I wanted to place the fragment on another page.

Here the solution was simple. Just place the webring fragment on both pages. There is nothing that states that you cannot have the fragment on as many pages as needed.

This solved all of the problems:

1. Visitors are not distracted into leaving our website by other webrings on the same page.
2. The controls for the webring are always in the same place making it easy for visitors to continue surfing the webring if desired
3. Visitors know exactly why the site is in that webring as it is immediately stated.
4. Links to useful or related pages are presented immediately, enticing visitors to explore the site more fully.

I would highly recommend other webmasters employ this technique. I've already noticed from analyzing traffic that visitors are staying longer and visiting more pages. It is a lot of work and creates a few extra pages, but it's definitely worth the effort.