#19 - Should You Join a WebRing?

Should You Join a WebRing?

By Chris Maher

Webrings are a really neat idea. They provide a way for sites that have viewers with a common interest to pass visitors directly to each other.

Sites that join a ring are listed on a server at the http://www.Webring.org site. When a visitor clicks on the Webring logo at a member site, they are automatically sent to the next site in the ring. If you were to continue to click on the Webring links you would eventually end up back at the site you started from.

The original Webring was created in May of 1995 by Sage Weil. (Who was then 17 years old!) The Webring universe has since grown to include over 18,000 separate rings and 250,000 individual web sites. New sites are being added at a rate of 1,800 per day. Some rings have only a few sites in them, others have hundreds. If you don't see a ring that you want to belong to, you can start one yourself. It's all completely free.

There are lots of artist rings you can join. Under the category of Arts and Humanities there are currently 377 rings. Joining a artist ring, however, is likely to bring you other artists looking at your site, not customers.

So how are Webrings especially relevant to you? What you want to do is join a ring that consists of web sites that would attract your customers.

For example, say you are an artist who paints horses. Searching the RingWorld site at http://www.webring.org/ringworld/ using the word "horse" shows 58 rings that have the keyword horse in them. Of those rings, the largest is the Quarter Horse Webring with 130 sites in it. If you join a ring that is full of people who are interested in what you create, you are likely to get the kind of visitors who may turn into buyers.

If you create work that is relevant to many different rings, segregate it by type and create pages of similar work. Then join the rings that will send those pages interested people.

Not all rings may welcome you as a member. The person who starts a given ring sets the rules for membership in that ring. Some rings use voting to select who joins, most seem to be run by individuals.

You may find that there are unexpected benefits of being connected to a larger group of like minded people. One of the people I contacted while I was researching this article, Chris Kawalek, credits the Webring on his site with getting him his current job as a www page designer.

Like everything online, new ideas are rapidly adopted and imitated. A new WebRing server, called RingSurf, is attempting to improve on the original. Considerably smaller, with less freedom to create new rings, it is trying to compete on a simpler interface, and automatic switching of ring traffic. Also new is a WebRing server called Looplink. It currently has 70 rings and 2,000 sites, most of which are commercial, all of which are pre-screened. Be sure to check them all out.

So what do you think? Can you categorize your work in such a way that Webring links will bring you the right kind of visitor?

This page last updated: 09/02/04

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