already know the environmentalist message – their curiosity will not be sparked and they are less likely to enter the site to find out what it is all about. A title such as “forward” or “stimulus” or “truth”, or “what now?” is likely to delay the message long enough to get people into the site.
A label which is not recognised by the public can therefore have advantages which labels like “Greenpeace” or “Friends of the Earth” can not possibly have.
It is also essential to get the site name right as search engines use the title as the main keyword for searches.
Content
Obviously there needs to be a lot of ethical stuff there. But this needs to be mixed with non-eco stuff in a palatable form. Disguised. The author Bill Bryson writes a large amount of ethical, and environmental work, but he manages to put it across in a humorous and readable fashion. He succeeds in getting across green information to many millions of people; people who don’t choose to read books on environmentalism, and that is our required audience.
Content needs to be sexy, humorous, thought-provoking, cool and un-threatening.
In the short term, content can be self-written, or borrowed from other well respected sources.
Opportunities for links to MP’s, companies, NGO’s etc are there in front of the user to make it easier for them to lobby whoever.
Optimisation
Optimisation is what web site managers do to get their sites high up on the rankings, when a search engine is used to list sites. It involves a range of tactics which are relatively easy to carry out, but many site-managers don’t optimise their sites correctly, and consequently they have few visitors. We can therefore have the edge over other sites by applying ourselves and using imagination to optimise a site. Here are a few ideas.
- use a wide range of key words