Here's a sneak preview screenshot of the soon-to-be-launched

GIDTopsites™ Members' Control Panel

Attached Images

sneak_gidtopsites.png (11.1 KB, 63 views)

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J de Silva
Learning Journal | GIDForums™ | GIDNetwork™ | GIDWebhosts™ | GIDSearch™

Looks very nice and all that. I was wondering though, are you going to let anyone apply for a spot on the list or are you going to analyse the quality first? I was just wondering because if you begin to create a reputation of having quality links, more quality sites will link back to you. I know mine isn't the best site but you catch my drift.

The problem with "screening" sites that want to sign up is...who the hell has the time?!

Depends if JDS wants to share the burden of analysing the sites. Obviously it depends on how much traffic he starts to receive. I really meant when the site started to really kick off and you don't want all these dead end sites that hang on many of the others making it difficult to navigate.

Apply? NO...

But in my list of things to do, there is an incentive plan for the members.

It works like this, if a reader reaches GIDTopsites from your website and submits a qualifying site, then you earn 'a bonus hits multiplier' for a certain period (thereby effectively ensuring that your website is always 'ON' the list for that duration) - so the more your readers convert, the LONGER and HIGHER your website appears on the list - without any doubt.

Somewhere around version 2+; there will certainly be a need for me to add multi-admin support and for me to find some trustworthy individuals who will help me 'screen' sites that want to get in.

I don't care much for quality sites, cause 1 person's piece of crap may be just what the doctor ordered for another. So who am I to judge? Besides the main point behind the script was to HELP people who start out, get their site noticed by the most important search engines.

As long as a reader coming to the list off a Webmaster site to find other Webmaster sites, I think that, has it's usefulness....

In essence the site is for 2 groups of people; the webmasters and the regular web surfers - both, getting something out of it!

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J de Silva
Learning Journal | GIDForums™ | GIDNetwork™ | GIDWebhosts™ | GIDSearch™

I know this isn't relevant to the post but it is an idea for future development possibly:
There was this thing I saw on (www.freeviral.com) that was a fairly awesome idea where you had to click I think it was 7 sites and get a code that appeared at the top of each site in order to join. What could be done with the topsites.gidhelp.com is that they have to check 5 sites out of all the sites that are available and key in the codes in order to join. Just an idea.
So say a webmaster wants to join, then they check out 5 webmaster sites and then join.

That MAY sound like a novel and good idea but trust me, it won't pay in the long term! The reason is simple, everybody involved in this is getting untargetted hits.

Think about that word, 'untargetted' and you'll slowly figure out why so many seemingly successful and happenin' sites suddenly get to asking for 'donations' to stay alive! They were so concerned with site traffic stats that they couldn't figure out why they had 100,00 hits yesterday but nobody bought a thing!

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J de Silva
Learning Journal | GIDForums™ | GIDNetwork™ | GIDWebhosts™ | GIDSearch™

Man you've got a good head on that body JDS. I'm struggling for an answer to this one apart from "Your right". Although what I was specifically pointing at was the new entrant viewing the sites they wanted to see (in the list) rather than being bombarded with completely irrelevant ones. I know your right people aren't like that they just click on the first one to get it over with right?

Yep, that's about the size of it. Actually, when I go to a site like that I click the first one that get's me the hell outta there and make sure I never go back...