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I'm not sure where I picked up the term "passion sites" for classifying websites from but no, it's not original. If the real author of this term will stand up, I'll be happy to acknowledge him/her.

Last year, I talked with kicks who is the webmaster at adultbizpower.com about passion sites and more recently the subject came up again as commentary on my article titled: Fragmentation: Webmaster Resource Sites.

After doing some checking through the articles I've written to date I realized, much to my bewilderment, that I'd never written an article about passion sites and their place in a webmaster's site portfolio.

Now because I have a passion for writing (and hopefully because some folks have been and continue to be nice enough to read -- and comment on -- these occasional ardent textual forays), I sat to set the record straight.

When I think of "passion" I will always think first of the story of the late, great Professor Strunk (who wrote *the* de facto standard on writing: The Elements of Style http://www.bartleby.com/141/ in 1918) who would come into his writing class and pound his fist on the desk characteristically exclaiming to students: "Omit needless words! Omit needless words!"

Websites can be generally categorized, no matter what the niche, into at least these three very specific categories:

1) business / profit generating
2) passion
3) reference only

The new rage with weblogs, also called blogs is reintroducing and helping to evangelize passion sites to the web. Anybody, anywhere can be a publisher and easily with blogging. No editorial requirements or lengthy publishing delays, no censors, no need to be politically correct, heck no need to even be a webmaster, and as long as the content is legal (well, one could argue that some of it is not) posting it on the web is painless.

If you are interested in starting your own blog then I wrote about how easy it is to do so in a recent Script School course (4 weeks on Surfer Interaction) done in association with Adult Netsurprise: http://www.adultnetsurprise.com/learningzone/surfer_interaction/week1.html

Passion sites are what made the web what it is today, and sure this point is debateable, but I could make a compelling argument that the web was not built and could not survive primarily on spam, redirects, pop-ups and banner advertisements. If that's all it had ever been about then it would have already gone the way of the dinosaur.

So what exactly is a passion site?

It's a site created out of the love and passion of creativity for an idea, activity, ideal, opinion, etc. The passion site isn't done for the money and that is obvious in the delivery, design and implementation. There might be a few money-making options like donation boxes to help offset the bandwith, but the primary focus is -- and must always be -- the content.

Now some of you are probably asking what does this have to do with business? How can you make money with passion sites where the primary focus is clearly not to make money?

The answer is that sometimes elusive golden goose on the web: traffic.

If you have traffic you can make money, period. The key is you just have to be careful about what you do with the traffic that you have. Drive those folks from your passion sites to your profit-generating websites. If they like your passion, chances improve that they will want to do business with you, somewhere.

Remember that as a webmaster you have the ability to be as prolific as you want to be. This is to enforce that it isn't a crime to create some experimental websites from time to time. It can also renew your faith in the business being not just work, but fun.

However, phony passion sites won't do the trick, so don't waste your time generating sites which "look like" passion sites. You'll be discovered and the surfers won't bother and in fact, might remember you as a scammer. They are smarter than that, so don't insult surfer's intelligence. Ok, well, maybe AOLers. (That was a joke!)

I started http://www.php-scripts.com/ sort of as a passion site and in many respects it still is a passion site. Take a look at it. It isn't fancy, doesn't have a slick design (well, at least at the time of this writing), the front page still has my "message to the net" written in December of 1999.

It was intended to be a diary of my online learning of the php programming language, complete with code examples, and fundamentally that is still the purpose over 3 years later. Search engines like Google devour text-plentiful passion sites like this.

Do a search at Google for "porn" and the number one site for over 70 million results (as of this writing) is furniture porn: a passion site featuring humor like: "Chairlies Angels". I spoke to an adult webmaster in the top 10 for that keyword who is generating dozens of signups a week from that listing. The furniture porn site is being bombarded and it seeks to sell very little except its own humorous talents. But ... dig down and you'll find this site is run by a group of comedians known as the van gogh-goghs who do sketch comedy and are looking for their big break.

With search engine data like this, and my own results, I'd assert that quality (the older the better) passion sites could possibly make it easier to get ranked higher than profit generating sites on some search engines like Google for certain business niches anyway. I bet the SEO and other search engine experts cringe when I write stuff like this. It's just my opinion, folks, and you know what they say about opinions, but look at how many adult webmasters would kill for the #1 listing at Google for the keyword "porn" and here it goes to a satire site called furniture porn.

But interestingly enough, even furniture porn, traces back to a profit-generating venture (the comedy group is looking for exposure for their act).

So when does a passion site stop being a passion site?

Usually when it becomes a financial necessity. The bandwith will eat alive the passion website unless these sites are structured around funneling the traffic to a site which is profit-generating. They have to begin to sell out some of what made their websites what they became introducing banners and popups and that can lead to a reduction in the traffic. It's sort of a vicious Catch-22.

I'm certainly not suggesting that you start mass producing passion sites, but I am suggesting that if you do something you love doing that it will show. People can recognize, and will reward with their browsing time learning more about what you do, if you have an interesting, humorous, or compelling passion site. Do not discount the passion site's usefulness in your website portfolio.

So think about what you really have a passion for and consider building at least one website around this passion in 2003. Then, think of a way to soft sell your family of profit-generating websites to traffic from this passion site. And even if your passion site isn't very popular right away, stick at it, because at the least you will have a lot of fun doing it.

Happy coding to you!

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TDavid's achievements over the years on the web include: writing and contributing over 100 different articles to various online publications, writing a print magazine column, custom programming for clients spanning the globe, owning and operating numerous websites like http://www.tdscripts.com/, and he has hosted a weekly live radio show on Fridays from 2-4pm PT focusing on the technical side of webmastering since May 2000 at http://www.scriptschool.com/radio/

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