A lot of online businesses are noticing some changes taking place in previously established social media and search engine ecosystems.
Whilst a well-designed links page to social media and storefronts can be enough for some, businesses that provide niche products and services or otherwise rely on a more personalised marketing touch are looking for alternative ways to get their message across.
One of the most interesting choices that some businesses have made has been to revive the almost lost art of webrings.
A webring is a network of websites that are linked by a common interest or theme. Unlike blogs or social media, they were typically managed by a central operator and had a unified widget, badge or set of links that would be added to each participating website.
There were typically options to go to the previous or next site on the list, or go to the home page of the webring itself to see a complete list of websites. The idea is that you could visit something specific, or you could keep travelling along the ring until you came back to your starting point.
The idea is that you are part of a community of like-minded people or businesses, and in a quid pro quo type exchange, people will link to and therefore send traffic to your website as long as you do the same.
Before the development of reliable search engines and thus search engine optimisation, it was the only way to both find new online content and be found online, but even in a more modern online age, it could still be beneficial for certain types of businesses.
If your brand relies on an extremely strong community or creative spirit, such as artists, writers, niche low-volume manufacturers or other websites where your personality is a significant part of your brand’s appeal, a relevant webring could bring in much higher quality clicks.
It is not a fast form of discovery, and the organic nature of people clicking from a webring means that it almost defies metrics, but anyone who finds your site through a webring will likely care enough to get in touch or be more likely to make a purchase.
As centralised platforms can become less secure and social media users become more fragmented, a personal website has become more important than ever, as are alternative forms of networking such as webrings.
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