How big should a site be?

Does it help if you have hundreds or thousands of html pages in your site or is it better to have a nice landing page and a database to access the content?

 

It should be as big as it needs to be to get your ideas across.

 

Don't create pages just for the sake of it. Just create the ones you need.

 

Have a nice landing page, take the content from the database and use mod_rewrite to make the urls appear as user friendly page.

 

Don't use a landing page. Having a home page however, is recommended, but make sure you put content that your visitors are going to want (like latest updates, opt-ins and a quick embedded mini-contact form so they can contact you right then and there).

Also, make your site as big (or small) as it's needed. Make sure it's scalable and that it can handle future growth.

 

Its possible you should have hundreds of thousands of pages... if you've got hundreds of thousands of products to sell. More likely, you need to review how much information and products you have any create an appropriate number of pages.

 

How about compromising and having a home page that looks as good as a landing page? Images, colours and so on.

In my opinion you're best off from a rapid development point of view having it in a database then having a page draw the content from there. If you don't think you can do that yourself, just check out Joomla - it does exactly that and it's fully customizeable. It's also free..

If it's a small site, just use seperate static pages. Some people claim for it to have a positive impact on SEO too.

 

What do you think a home page is? It's a landing page that actually serves a purpose.

But then again, technically ANY page can be a landing page, since you have no idea where anyone will be coming to your Web site in the first place.

 

Well the best way to protect against that would simply be just to have the whole of your site look good and reputable..

If you know where your traffic is coming from (perhaps you use use analytics software or you've made your own), you can optimize the pages that are getting the most hits to look the most inviting.

 

I am looking to advertise one of my dating sites using the information from profiles, there is no copyright on the text, I already have approval from the owners of the affiliate program to copy and paste my content and the marketeing stuff. I initailly I was thinking I'd have a page per member and invite people to join to meet in some provocative way.
I was thinking if I did this there could be a lot of content hits but I've never tried more than a few pages and updates from dataabse lists before.
Will the extra pages be more likely to get hits?
I was also thinking of a myspace account per member in order to give at least one link in thats quite easy for people to find in the community.
maybe bebo and other social sites if it works out too.
hopefully this will help with some of the questions since you now know a bit more about what I'm planning.

I hope you will be able to advise me further.

tx

Paul

 

If you don't have a trusted site then you should steer clear of adding too many pages as it will spread your link equity very thinly and might stop your main pages ranking.

If your site is trusted you can add as many pages as you like.

 

Thanks Mad4 I'll go for the database option then since it will be a new site

Paul

 

I am sorry, I meant homepage not landing page. It is ok SEO wise.

 

If you copy and paste content, you won't benefit from it SEO wise. You'll get docked for duplicate content.

 

i really appresiate the sites which have a nice landing page

 

If you copy content in whole from other pages, yes you can be penalized for having duplicate content. However, if you're syndicating portions of Web feeds (like breaking news from CNN) from other sites, or featuring content from your blog on your home page, you'll be fine.

Just remember the word "moderation" and you'll be fine.

Most of the time.

 

The content is only accessible after log in via a database will it still be the same issue?
Will it get crawled by the search engine still, the sections from the database?

 

If it's final output is as HTML, yes, it will be crawable and indexable by search engines. It doesn't matter if you use a database, parse an RSS feed or whatnot, if the final end result is plain vanilla HTML code and text, you can bet the farm that the search engines will pick it up.

 

IMO the better is hundreds or thousands of pages generated dynamically with database content, RSS feeds, users inputs... And instead of only one landing page, make as much landing pages as possible (optimized and linked, of course).

 

its up to u how big u want it to be