Even websites without PhD designers need to marry a simple outward appearance with a more complicated set of calculations around intended audiences. The average visitor looks at one or two pages on a site and then hits the back button. Often they'll be following a search link and looking at a page buried deep in your site. They'll be there seeking out specific information and you only have about twenty seconds to pitch your site and keep them there. You need to give them a very concise description of yourself or product and you need to entice them with related material.

Any site that consists of more than three pages presents visitors with more information than they can handle. Good design works to funnel visitors to the specific content they are looking for. It's relatively easy to get a first-time visitor but successful websites keep them on your site and give them reasons to return. The key to this is defining your audience and presenting your material with them in mind.

Once you've identified your constituency and built your design, the next step is release. You don't want to pander to a potential audience, but instead converse with them. It's fine to mix different elements of your life together and to write creatively off-topic once in awhile. There are a thousand generic websites crammed full of useless bu zzphrases and unused featured. What you want is one that will have a voice, that builds a niche that no one else might ever have identified. When it comes time to produce content, forget all the slick marketing calculations you've done and let your quirkiness shine.

Inspired by Doing Your Whole Site with MT on Brad Choate's site, I started experimenting today with putting the whole Nonviolence.org site into Movable Type. At first I thought it was just a trial experiment but I'm hooked. I especially love how much cleaner the entry for the links page now looks and I might actually be inspired to keep it up to date more now. (I've also integrated Choate's MT-Textile which makes a big difference in keeping entries clean of HMTL garbage, and the semi-related SmartyPants which makes the site more typographically elegant with easy M-dashes and curly quotes).

So here's what I'm doing: there are three Movable Type blogs interacting with one another (not including this personal blog):

• One is the more-or-less standard one that is powering the main homepage blog of Nonviolence.org.
• The second I call "NV:Static" which holds my static pages, much as Brad outlines. I put my desired URL path into the Title field (i.e., "info/index") and then put the page's real title into the Keywords field (i.e., "About Nonviolence.org") and have that give the data for the title field and the first headline of the page. It might seem backwards to use Title for URL and then use Keywords for Title, but this means that when I'm in MT looking to edit a particular file, it will be the URL paths that are listed.
• The third blog is my "NV:Design Elements." This contains the block of graphics on the top and left of every page. I know I'll have to redesign this all soon and I can do it from wherever. This blog outputs to HTML. All the other pages on the site are PHP and its a simple include to pull the top and left bars into each PHP page.

Oh yes, I'm also thinking of incorporating guest blogs in the near future and all of these elements should make that much easier.

Here's another site to check out, about how someone integrated Movable Type into their church website using some interesting techniques.