Making your site more attractive to users and link owners

[Bruceper]

So I get asked all the time, "how do I make my site more attractive?". The only answer I can give you is customization.

Lets take for example a site I recently re-launched which is moparmuscle.net.

Instead of just being a link site, why not make your site more interactive and have useful things on it?

How about letting a company add a logo?
How about their phone number or address?
Perhaps screenshots?
Maybe a catalog or flyer?

First I want you to visit the following URL as an unregistered user.

You'll see it's just a plain jane listing with nothing special about it except for some text at the top that says

You may be able to see more information about this listing if you login.
Not a member yet? register today for free.

That's different isn't it? Click on Register and check out what that page has to say.

It's not the typical register page is it? Nope, this one actually has information to interest the user into signing up.

Go ahead and login to the site with the following details

user: testuser
pass: 123456

Now go back and visit the URL I posted earlier.

A huge difference now that the user is logged in. There actually seems to be something interesting there now.

If you feel like downloading the catalog at the bottom of the description be careful, it's 16MB in size so you might have to wait a bit to see it if your connection is slow.

You can check out the Add page to see how all the fields are listed. Of course if one of the fields isn't filled in, it doesn't appear. You can verify that here

By just adding a little bit of text, and some custom fields the site has changed from plain and boring to somewhat interactive and a whole lot more useful.

Sure there's a lot more I could do, like using a thumbnail mod and the lightbox mod and make nice popup images from the thumbnails. But I haven't gotten that far yet.

I'm sure you have a creative mind, so don't let any complexity get in your way of showing your site the way you want it to. No one is going to make fun of you if you ask a question, we're just going to help you out.

We won't write the code for you, but we will point you in the right direction!

I hope you enjoyed this sample of what can be done on an IndexU Deluxe site.

NOTE There actually is a bit more in the background that you don't see which mostly deals with .htaccess files and allowing file uploads larger than 2MB and a higher timeout along with file protection to make sure your site doesn't become a file hosting site.

Although on second thought, maybe you want it to be... The possibilities are almost endless.

[Bruceper]

Followup - The URL above and the user login above will only work for a day or two. They are just temporary. Screenshots below show you exactly what I am talking about.

[Dr. Jekyll]

Very interesting!

[Bruceper]

Thanks, this isn't a new idea at all. But it's been a long time since anyone posted anything like this so I though I'd do it again.

Just trying to show what IndexU can be used for.