Planning a New Site

Preparing for Later Expansion

[Skier]

I am planning a site that will eventually become "Widgets of the World". I would like to develop to that point by launching components in steps. "Widgets of Mytown" will go live, later expanding to "Widgets of Mystate" and on to "Widgets of Mycountry".

I am worried about the limitations I will create now that will haunt me later.

For example: A DMOZ listing and snippet that does a good job for "Mytown" today may be a real problem later when I expand to "Mycountry". (I have a another site that is forever haunted by a DMOZ listing that seemed appropriate at launch, but is now outdated.)

Similarly, I wonder about potential future difficulties in site mechanics, and how I should prepare for them now. I can't really set up the "Myworld" context while only launching "Mytown" content today.

What should I be considering while planning for expansion in steps?

[phantombookman]

I went through the same thing, I built a site that was to be the ultimate resource site for widgets.

Obviously with handcrafted pages going on slowly it was far from being so initially.
I was concerned that much of the layout, slogans etc would not fit the site.

I decided on the long game and built it for the future.
Ironically, this was an instance of the sandbox actually helping a little. The time with very little traffic gave me space to put content on so when real traffic started coming it looked more like "what it said on the tin"

[Skier]

Thanks Bookman.

How did you deal with the "missing content" originally? The old "under construction/coming soon" approach?

[phantombookman]

I added all my navigation pages for all the various sections and laid them out with the anchor text etc.

As and when a page was ready I hyperlinked the appropriate link text

Pages carried something like
'this is very much a work in progress please do bookmark us and return, new content is being added daily, we thak you in advance for your patience'

[Skier]

Ok. That makes sense. I do like the idea of getting all the sections laid out in advance and setting up the future links with anchor text already in place.

Thanks again.

Anyone have thoughts on the impact of this approach for SEO? Will the SE's and Directories have problems with an exaggerated description of the contents of the tin during its early days? Should I consider voluntarily sandboxing myself until the lable better matches the contents? I'd rather not, since the initial content should be commercially viable, albeit only for a limited subset of the market.