Think Soap...

I really think you could have alot of fun with this one. The idea is that you create your own online soap opera story. Just like All My Children or General Hospital, you could regularly add new episodes encouraging your visitors to return again and again. As with the television soaps, you could have vamps, hunks, goody-two-shoes, and devil incarnates. Your storyline could have enough twists and turns to make your visitors dizzy.

Most TV soaps have been on the air for years and their characters become established over time. You'll have to establish your characters in quick order. One idea is to create a personal "homepage" for each of your characters. These pages would give you a chance to give each character a past and to establish their motivations, skeletons in their closets, and their style or persona. If each of these pages had its own guestbook - you could encourage visitors to provide the characters advice or to scold them for their bad behavior. I think this idea would be very popular with your visitor.

All the action could happen just on the various "homepages" with each character describing in their own words what's happening in their own online journal. I like that idea but it suggests very complicated navigation for your visitor to understand what's going on. It might work better to give some sort of overview that is the front-end for your soap. It would be the main place where the plot gets discussed. Each character could still make comments in their respective journals. It would make them more real because it would allow each to express what they are thinking.

Of course the nature of the storyline is totally up to you. It could be totally over the top, quite serious, or something in-between. If you are being silly with it, one dumb idea I can suggest is to illustrate your site only with pictures of you! The idea is that you dress up as all the different characters ( male and female ) then take pictures of yourself making a bunch of facial expressions. You then incorporate these small close-ups into your story as appropriate. Lets say Mavis, the semi-retired truck-stop hooker, has just learned from the pool boy that her 24 year-old daughter Raquel has just lost her job as CEO of the aerospace conglomerate. You might be inclined to include your stock picture of Mavis sobbing. Fun eh? When I get a digital camera I'll do a demo of this idea to show you how it might work - staring yours truly. Come back here again later to see the results.

It is probably quite possible to create an entertaining work without using pictures. After all most works of great literature don't have pictures ;-) You can leave some things to your visitors imagination - it is also alot easier.

I believe one of the best things about creating your own online soap is that you can easily get your site's visitors involved. As I noted above each character could have their own guestbook. Each character could even have their own email address if you want. DesignStop.Com will give you as many free web-based email accounts as you want. Get them here. You can also get your visitors involved by encouraging them to suggest storyline ideas, write love letters or hate mail to your characters. You can then post the best of these to your site.

A website like I'm describing has the potential to be quite popular. If you were so inclined you might be able to take it from be a hobby into the commercial realm. You could sell advertising and product placements once you have built up the traffic to the site - with help from DesignStop.Com that isn't a problem. See my pages on marketing and promotion. You can go directly there with this link.
Heck you could even turn the idea into a ecommerce site. Imagine if one of your characters ran a sleezy online video store - the store could really exist and you'd get rich, not the character. It is a interesting concept isn't it? I recommend starting with the story and building your site's traffic. Once you are getting many thousands of page views you can easily sell advertising and move into adding an ecommerce component if that's your inclination.

I hope you like this idea as much as I do. I certainly hope that if you decide to try it you'll and let me know all about it. Maybe you really could have that handsome character named Ross ...