Website Idea: Directory of Online Help Communities
Every so often I’ll get an idea for a Web app and I’ll share it on this blog. Last time, I had an idea for a news aggregator that pulls news from sources of various perspectives (i.e. both sides of conflict in the middle east, etc).
Today, I want to share another idea: a directory of technical help communities online. A place where a visitor can easily find links to the most active help communities of a specific topic, like HTML, math, physics, language, and so on…
But I’m not talking about a simple collection of forums, mailing lists, social networks and chat rooms. It’s more than that…
Essentially…
It’s a directory, like the 100,000 other directories on the web. But this one has a specific definition. It only lists community sites related to technical subjects.
Quality versus quantity
I realize that for each technical topic, there would be several communities scattered across the Web. The job of this directory is not to include them all, but only those most active. The level of activeness would be gauged using:
- the number of posts in forums
- number of messages per day in a mailing list
- number of users in a chat room
To reduce maintenance, these numbers should be pulled dynamically — using a Web spider of some sort…
Classification is gonna be a challenge
In projects like these, classification is always a challenge. Some help communities will overlap. For example, there could be a help community dedicated graphic design. And another one dedicated to Photoshop. But the topics discussed within each community are the same.
How are these going to be classified? This is something that should be looked into. But…
Before a criteria for classification can be determined, the raw data need to be collected. Having the complete set of data will provide better understanding of how the communities relate and how they should be organized.
Search engine optimization
A well SEO’d resource like this can bring lots of traffic. Here’s a table showing the number of monthly searches for each of the following keywords:
| Keyword |
Monthly Searches |
| php help | 3,600 |
| photoshop help | 8,000 |
| math help | 90,500 |
| english help | 2,900 |
On-site optimization
The structure of the URLs in this directory is gonna be important. For example, if I were to create this directory as part of this website, here’s how I would structure the URLs
- http://msafi.com/online-help/php/
- http://msafi.com/online-help/photoshop/
- http://msafi.com/online-help/math/
- etc…
For each page, I would list all the relevant forums, chat rooms, and mailing lists. I would also write a little paragraph describing each one. These paragraphs would help in capturing long tail search engine keywords.
Other basic on-page SEO stuff apply here, of course.
Off-site optimization
A comprehensive, free, and helpful resource like the one described here is very easy to promote on social networks and to other webmasters. Getting link backs would require much less effort/money than getting link backs for a blatantly commercial site.
Provide supporting articles
It’s a good idea to provide supporting articles with this resource.
Research and write articles to help users ask good questions. Educate people on how to use forums. Tell them to search first if the question has been asked. In chat rooms tell them not to flood the channels with big copy/pastes. And for mailing lists…I don’t know…Tell them how to properly post a reply…
Actually, I might work on this project…
With this post I wanted to clear my head by getting the ideas out “on paper”. This is something I would like to work on; not the data gathering and classification parts (I’ll probably outsource those tasks), but the programming, development, and SEO part.
And if I do it, it’s indeed gonna be part of this website. Wanna contribute?
