If you’ve spent any time at all looking over this web site, you will quickly find that we are great fans of webrings. The webring system is an excellent way to bring small, steady amounts of targeted traffic directly to your website without too much work and no expense. There are tens of thousands of web rings to choose from, and you can create your own specialized, tailored rings anytime you want.

Some people, though, just don’t understand. Let’s start with the person running a webring. Here are the things to avoid if you are a ringmaster.

  1. The webring system will perform automatic ring checking. Please DO take advantage of this to keep your ring intact. There is little more frustrating than a poorly maintained ring. Please DON’T allow your ring to deteriorate into a bunch of missing sites and 404 errors.
  2. Please DO maintain your standards. If you say you want only sites about teachers in your ring, then only allow sites about teachers. If you allow in sites that do not match your criteria you are defeating one of the primary purposes of a webring – targeted traffic.
  3. Please DON’T put in things like “youridhere” or “__id__” in your fragment. Please DO take advantage of the webring variables which will do the substitution for you.

And now for the DO‘s and DON’Ts for people adding webrings to their sites.

  1. Please, please, please, DO put the webring fragment on the same page that your signed up for in the webring. A major purpose of a webring is to be able to surf from site to site, and it can be very frustrating to have to hunt all over yours just to find the ring fragment.
  2. Please DON’T put the webring fragment in a page within a frame. If you are going to put webrings on your site, then you should create non-framed versions of the pages (you should do that anyway, but that’s a different article). The major reason is that the automatic ring checking robots cannot check your fragment if it’s within a framed page.
  3. Generally, please DON’T please your webring fragments on your home page. Instead, DO place them all through your site. Webrings fragments are not very attractive as a rule, and they almost never fit in with your color or design scheme. We tend to use webring welcome pages, each of which is for a single webring fragment.
  4. DO join as many webrings as you can find the time for and as fit within the topic of your site. There is no reason not to join dozens or even hundreds of webrings. Join one a day and you will see your traffic slowly edge upwards. The more sites join webrings in general, the more traffic is generated by the whole system.

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