It's really quite simple to turn your little site into a throbbing hit whore.

All you need is these simple ingredients

  1. Update constantly: Web sites are living, breathing entities... At least as far as anybody browsing them is concerned. If you don't update; no one will come. Certainly, you may have one or two gems on your site, but if you can't drive the traffic there, no one will see them.
  2. Determine your audience: Who do you want to see your site? If it's for your family, tailor it to them. If it's a site for your church group, you probably want to stay away from your crazy penthouse forum party stories; inversely, if you're planning on getting linked from Penthouse, nobody with their dick in their hand wants to click a link to see a picture of Jesus being crucified.
  3. Design for use: Whoever created the 'Tie-Dye background' needs to be shot. Don't help them justify their cause. Other than that; don't use some strange font. Don't use fluorescent colors. DO NOT USE THE BLINK TAG!. Don't type in all caps. Do not use the blink tag!.
    Design itself is really quite simple. Look at a magazine. Any magazine. See how the paper contrasts with the text? Remember that, it's important. If it's hard to read your site, people won't.
  4. Pimp it: It used to be the case that updating your META tags and submitting to a few search engines were all you really needed to get people to your site. Of course, it also used to be the case that there far fewer than the three trillion websites on the net. So, toss that idea. What you need are friends. Friends with web-sites. Link to them, and ask them to link to you. This is called reciprocal linking. It is your friend. It is your best friend, if you want lots of traffic.
    Other things you can do to pimp your site:
    • Come up with a good catch-phrase for your site.
    • Take that catch phrase, and use it as a signature everywhere you can; make sure to include the URL.
    • Try to talk as many people as you can into linking to your site. This is easier if you have actual content.
    • If you've said something worthwhile, people will take their time to read it.
    • Keep in mind; web-surfers have notoriously short attention spans. Try to make it interesting as well
Once you've started getting some hits to your site; you'll want to start making it better.
Here are a few very worthwhile resources to help you improve your site:
  • A List Apart: http://alistapart.com (Discussion for Designers)
  • Webmonkey: http://webmonkey.com (Miscellaneous web design & programming tips
  • W3C: http://w3c.org (Make sure you follow the standards)
  • Greymatter: http://noahgrey.com/greysoft (Fantastic blogging software)
  • Blogger: http://blogger.com (Blogging again, a little easier this time)
  • Links.net: http://www.links.net (The homepage of Justin Hall, one of the original 'Home-Page' authors, use this for a good example)