Everyone thinks their opinion is important. As a webmaster, you can cash in on that while at the same time improving the experience that your site offers visitors. It’s called democracy, and while it’s not all that new, far too few people are capitalizing on it..Everyone thinks their opinion is important. As a webmaster, you can cash in on that while at the same time improving the experience that your site offers visitors. It’s called democracy, and while it’s not all that new, far too few people are capitalizing on it.

If you’ve seen Slashdot’s message boards, you’ve seen one good application. Slashdot users can effectively vote for the quality of a post, and the post can move up into more prominence, or down into relative obscurity. There’s an incentive, therefore, to post quality content which will be moderated up.

The same principle can be applied to all aspects of a web site. If you know that your users love a particular picture, you can feature it more prominently on the site. Likewise with stories.

There are a couple of approaches to delivering a democratic site, but in my opinion the only reasonable ones make heavy use of dynamic content; PERL scripts and flat files at the low end, and compiled modules and a robust database at the high end. I won’t get into the merits of each, but suffice to say, the more democratic your site becomes, the more load will be placed on your backend.

Images are a perfect place to start; it’s fairly easy to let people “vote” on them, and the return is immediate and powerful. All it takes is a simple “How good is this picture?” form below an image, and you’ll start collecting valuable data. There are privacy issues if you keep track of each users’ voting, so I would recommend against it for now. But even an aggregate is worth a small fortune.

On the one hand, you’re building a database of your users’ favorite pictures. Those are going to be the content that drives revenue, and if you keep an eye on the most popular pics and use them to entice new people to sign up, you’ve got a self-adjusting system that takes the guesswork out of “What does my target audience want to see?” Conversion rates go up, but so do retention rates.

That’s because you’re showing your users that you value their opinion. They can vote and immediately see the results reflected in the “best” or “worst” pictures section. People love that.

Pictures, of course, are just a start. There are any number of other aspects of a site which can benefit from democratic processes. Stories, product reviews, and the aforementioned message boards are just a start. Any time you find yourself unsure of what will produce the happiest customers (and therefore the highest return), ask yourself what you can do to turn the decision over to the users.

If you play it right, the data just gets more and more valuable every day. For instance, we use our data about users’ favorite pictures to negotiate with content providers. If the last CD we bought drops like a stone to “least favorite material ever,” it gives us leverage. Likewise with popular content — it tells us who we should be doing more business with.

All that from a fairly simple application of democracy.

Everyone thinks their opinion is important. As a webmaster, you can cash in on that while at the same time improving the experience that your site offers visitors. It’s called democracy, and while it’s not all that new, far too few people are capitalizing on it..Everyone thinks their opinion is important. As a webmaster, you can cash in on that while at the same time improving the experience that your site offers visitors. It’s called democracy, and while it’s not all that new, far too few people are capitalizing on it.

If you’ve seen Slashdot’s message boards, you’ve seen one good application. Slashdot users can effectively vote for the quality of a post, and the post can move up into more prominence, or down into relative obscurity. There’s an incentive, therefore, to post quality content which will be moderated up.

The same principle can be applied to all aspects of a web site. If you know that your users love a particular picture, you can feature it more prominently on the site. Likewise with stories.

There are a couple of approaches to delivering a democratic site, but in my opinion the only reasonable ones make heavy use of dynamic content; PERL scripts and flat files at the low end, and compiled modules and a robust database at the high end. I won’t get into the merits of each, but suffice to say, the more democratic your site becomes, the more load will be placed on your backend.

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