For many times, we’ve tried to create a place where everything people wanted to learn about the internet would be readily available, without the common problems in other sites:
- Long introductions (taking too long to cut to the chase);
- Unclear (too confusing to understand or too technical);
- Lack of transparency (selling items, promoting/requiring memberships and not helping);
But we made several mistakes during that which we are presenting here.
Origins
MMOKB was intended to be a Wiki for making money online. That alone was the point where you can know where it started heading the wrong way, even more so if you already have some experience on the subject. The empty promises easily found on the Internet are far too numerous and outweight the legitimate ones. Telling them apart from each other can also be difficult and on the same time, becoming one is just as easy.
Unwary of this, we simply resumed the work in that subsite and started writing articles we believed to be helpful for our readers, but were mostly driven by that same idea. At the same time, we were shutting down the WINTEMO site, which was no longer popular due to several SEO mistakes and lack of fresh, new content.
When the new site was completed, it barely brought any interest on it. While we don’t have any figures, take a look at the following:
WINTEMO
VS
MMOKB
Traffic
Social Engagement
Returning Visitors
The only upsides MMOKB has, that are not listed, are how it’s easy to make posts and the navigation, which are stats pertaining to the website and not related to engagement.
Months before we moved it, while still hosted on Blogspot.com, it was the most popular site of our network, even more than the main.
Nevertheless, it was more favourable to keep it on a dedicated hosting platform rather than a free site. Later, it was determined to be redundant to keep two websites (WINTEMO and the Main Site) discussing the same matter. The old WINTEMO site is still online, despite not being updated and it can be accessible here.
Content
Back to the original topic, though…
It isn’t uncommon for webmasters, site owners and web dev teams to gather, build a website from the ground up, publish their work to an audience interested in the matter and get compensated through whatever sales they make or through advertising networks. If they are giving good value for their readers, we believe it to be a healthy relationship and a solid business model, provided that mutual trust is always present.
In our case, that transparency level hadn’t been reached and only recently we’ve updated our Privacy Policy and Terms to rectify that problem.
Yet, long before MMOKB’s obsolescence was determined, this brought us the above problem and another more serious issues to light; whereas a site is normally made to present media, often around articles and supplemented by advertising networks, affiliate products, etcetera, MMOKB was made to present tutorials, definitions and resources but did so through selling, and the much needed helpful guides became secondary, in effect, reversing the order.
After realizing this, no more work was made in MMOKB and a new project was put in development. At that point, the intention was not to scrap the site yet, since a few changes could solve both problems.
Platform
Another issue, which was not as severe but handicapping, was the platform where MMOKB was built, upon: Mediawiki, which is the same software currently used in the encyclopedia we all know as Wikipedia.
A fresh installation of Mediawiki does not contain the same as you see there, and we haven’t found a bundle that would bring us as close to it. To expand its functionalities, there are software packages that work a lot like Plugins for WordPress, called “Extensions” and just like WordPress, there are many of them.
The problem isn’t choosing them nor make early configurations or posting articles as we already explained on MMOKB’s current replacement. Standardization (making all posts share the same base format) takes coding skills and applying that to a page is time consuming. We’d rather spend that time posting.
WordPress themes natively support what we need and we have many of them, on top of working with it for more time than MediaWiki. To facilitate getting back up and since many posts from MMOKB weren’t suitable and those that were, were easy to back-up, MMOKB was shutdown. It featured 52 posts, where a good part of them will be slowly reinstated on the new site after being reworked.
PANTORIALS
We’ve been recently working on a Portal-based network that is shown on the main page you saw to aid us cumulatively add new sites here on the TRI. With regards to what was presented on MMOKB and the late WINTEMO, we are proposing you PANTORIALS.
PANTORIALS joins what we wanted to do in WINTEMO and what we’ve learned on MMOKB, with the same goal as before, providing instructional media for webmasters.
Conclusion
With that said, we sincerily apologize for not being helpful in the past and becoming another advertiser on the background, albeit temporarily.
Thankfully, we have found the mistake and are willing to correct it so we can begin anew with our readers and we hope you will still be around.
Wilson Pina – Site Admin