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The ultimate guide to offering resources on your site
The ultimate guide to offering resources on your site | Web Hosting Blog
Resources are a great way to attract links and visitors to your site, and can also be a good way to showcase smaller examples of your work such as buttons, banners and icons. The downside is of course that they require time and effort, but presenting quality resources in the right way can increase your reputation and exposure to make it worthwhile. The four Ps – purpose, producing, presentation and promoting – will guide you through making your resources successful:
Purpose
Why are you offering resources? It might be for link building, website promotion, increasing visitors, search engine optimisation, personal reputation or a combination of several of those, but consider which factors are the most important. Outlining your main purpose(s) will help you answer questions such as how much time you want to dedicate, how many resources you want to offer, whether they will be free or paid and so on.
Producing
An obvious question, but what resources are you going to offer? Popular freebies include fonts, Photoshop brushes and textures, WordPress themes, buttons, banners, wallpapers and icons, but the possibilities are endless. This is where ‘purpose’ resurfaces; if your resources are for minimum effort (e.g. page building or SEO), then buttons and banners are a quick and easy way to get content up. If you’re in it for the long haul or looking to make money, then it’s worth going to the effort of creating themes and fonts.
Check old files and folders on your computer to see if you have any forgotten or unused resources that you could tweak, develop into a collection, or get inspiration from. You may also want to consider which types of resources fit in best with the rest of your website’s content for SEO purposes, and what text and keywords you can include on the page(s).
Finally, will you be creating resources regularly, or are these a one-off? If regularly, you might want to think about how they will fit into your schedule and how much work is required.
Presentation
Where will you put your resources on your website, and how will visitors get to them? If your website has simple navigation, then it may be a case of adding a simple page link in your menu. For larger websites (particularly commercial ones), you may be faced with the issue of how to incorporate your resources without detracting from your other content whilst making them easy for your visitor to find and come back to. No small task! Promoting your resources will help, but try not to bury them too deep into your website, and include at least two links in different, logical places where possible. If you’re offering a variety of different resources, it might be worth giving them their own section or even setting up a subdomain for them.
How will your resources look on the page? You’ll need to incorporate a title, description, image and download/payment link, but what about organisation using page anchors, in-page navigation etc.? Will you use thumbnails, screenshots, previews, a gallery…?
Make sure you keep your downloads as consistent as the page(s) you display them on. For example, if you’re using zip files, keep the subdirectories and locations of images, readme file and so on consistent throughout all your downloads. Label subfolders, pages and images clearly, and include instructions and explanations in a text file where necessary.
The documentation you include with your download should also detail what the user can do with your work in terms of modification and redistribution. There are six Creative Commons licences available for you to choose from. Requiring a link back to your website is great for promotion and link building. Furthermore, for resources such as themes and scripts, you can incorporate a specific string of text and set up a Google Alert to alert you when someone’s using it so you can check they’ve kept your link intact.
If you’re offering paid resources, how do you want people to buy them – a full checkout process, PayPal, emailing you, etc.? You also need to decide whether you’re offering multiple downloads of resources or not, and price them accordingly. If you have a large library of resources, you might want to use scripts to display the most popular downloads, latest uploads and so on to make browsing faster.
Promoting
Even the highest-quality resources need some promotion behind them, so factor in extra time for this. Depending on your ‘purpose’, promoting your content may take a few minutes or continuing hours of work, so here are a few ideas to mix and match:
• Blog – A quick and obvious choice, mention your resources in your blog and any updates pages or feeds you have.
• Twitter & Facebook – Post a link, politely ask people to retweet or share it or even ask for opinions if you’re feeling brave.
• Submit to community sites such as The Web Blend, Digg and StumbleUpon. Already being an active member can be a big advantage and is worth spending time on if you produce a good amount of content.
• Forums – Promote your resources (without spamming, and only if there’s a relevant section) on web design message boards.
• Research collectives and galleries to showcase and promote your resources, for example Theme Forest.
• Include Twitter, Facebook and other social networking buttons next to each resource set so people can share them easily. These are also useful for stats.
Track downloads using Google Analytics or proudly display them. These stats can help you prune resources, removing less popular ones and adding more of the same type or style.
Final tips…
• It’s tedious after you’ve spent ages designing, coding and uploading, but go through the process of browsing, downloading, extracting (and installing, if relevant), all your resources as a visitor would, to check everything works as expected.
• Keep instructions and download links obvious on your resource pages. Link your screenshot or thumbnail to your download URL where possible, as they are often more tempting to click than text.
• Make any limitations clear before download – for example if the font you’ve created is for PCs and not compatible with Macs – and offer compatible versions where possible.
• Check all licences and copyright information for fonts and images before using them in your resources to make sure their requirements correlate with your usage.
The ultimate guide to offering resources on your site | Web Hosting Blog
Resources are a great way to attract links and visitors to your site, and can also be a good way to showcase smaller examples of your work such as buttons, banners and icons. The downside is of course that they require time and effort, but presenting quality resources in the right way can increase your reputation and exposure to make it worthwhile. The four Ps – purpose, producing, presentation and promoting – will guide you through making your resources successful:
Purpose
Why are you offering resources? It might be for link building, website promotion, increasing visitors, search engine optimisation, personal reputation or a combination of several of those, but consider which factors are the most important. Outlining your main purpose(s) will help you answer questions such as how much time you want to dedicate, how many resources you want to offer, whether they will be free or paid and so on.
Producing
An obvious question, but what resources are you going to offer? Popular freebies include fonts, Photoshop brushes and textures, WordPress themes, buttons, banners, wallpapers and icons, but the possibilities are endless. This is where ‘purpose’ resurfaces; if your resources are for minimum effort (e.g. page building or SEO), then buttons and banners are a quick and easy way to get content up. If you’re in it for the long haul or looking to make money, then it’s worth going to the effort of creating themes and fonts.
Check old files and folders on your computer to see if you have any forgotten or unused resources that you could tweak, develop into a collection, or get inspiration from. You may also want to consider which types of resources fit in best with the rest of your website’s content for SEO purposes, and what text and keywords you can include on the page(s).
Finally, will you be creating resources regularly, or are these a one-off? If regularly, you might want to think about how they will fit into your schedule and how much work is required.
Presentation
Where will you put your resources on your website, and how will visitors get to them? If your website has simple navigation, then it may be a case of adding a simple page link in your menu. For larger websites (particularly commercial ones), you may be faced with the issue of how to incorporate your resources without detracting from your other content whilst making them easy for your visitor to find and come back to. No small task! Promoting your resources will help, but try not to bury them too deep into your website, and include at least two links in different, logical places where possible. If you’re offering a variety of different resources, it might be worth giving them their own section or even setting up a subdomain for them.
How will your resources look on the page? You’ll need to incorporate a title, description, image and download/payment link, but what about organisation using page anchors, in-page navigation etc.? Will you use thumbnails, screenshots, previews, a gallery…?
Make sure you keep your downloads as consistent as the page(s) you display them on. For example, if you’re using zip files, keep the subdirectories and locations of images, readme file and so on consistent throughout all your downloads. Label subfolders, pages and images clearly, and include instructions and explanations in a text file where necessary.
The documentation you include with your download should also detail what the user can do with your work in terms of modification and redistribution. There are six Creative Commons licences available for you to choose from. Requiring a link back to your website is great for promotion and link building. Furthermore, for resources such as themes and scripts, you can incorporate a specific string of text and set up a Google Alert to alert you when someone’s using it so you can check they’ve kept your link intact.
If you’re offering paid resources, how do you want people to buy them – a full checkout process, PayPal, emailing you, etc.? You also need to decide whether you’re offering multiple downloads of resources or not, and price them accordingly. If you have a large library of resources, you might want to use scripts to display the most popular downloads, latest uploads and so on to make browsing faster.
Promoting
Even the highest-quality resources need some promotion behind them, so factor in extra time for this. Depending on your ‘purpose’, promoting your content may take a few minutes or continuing hours of work, so here are a few ideas to mix and match:
• Blog – A quick and obvious choice, mention your resources in your blog and any updates pages or feeds you have.
• Twitter & Facebook – Post a link, politely ask people to retweet or share it or even ask for opinions if you’re feeling brave.
• Submit to community sites such as The Web Blend, Digg and StumbleUpon. Already being an active member can be a big advantage and is worth spending time on if you produce a good amount of content.
• Forums – Promote your resources (without spamming, and only if there’s a relevant section) on web design message boards.
• Research collectives and galleries to showcase and promote your resources, for example Theme Forest.
• Include Twitter, Facebook and other social networking buttons next to each resource set so people can share them easily. These are also useful for stats.
Track downloads using Google Analytics or proudly display them. These stats can help you prune resources, removing less popular ones and adding more of the same type or style.
Final tips…
• It’s tedious after you’ve spent ages designing, coding and uploading, but go through the process of browsing, downloading, extracting (and installing, if relevant), all your resources as a visitor would, to check everything works as expected.
• Keep instructions and download links obvious on your resource pages. Link your screenshot or thumbnail to your download URL where possible, as they are often more tempting to click than text.
• Make any limitations clear before download – for example if the font you’ve created is for PCs and not compatible with Macs – and offer compatible versions where possible.
• Check all licences and copyright information for fonts and images before using them in your resources to make sure their requirements correlate with your usage.
