Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

This is day 2 in my series: New ways of driving traffic to your site or blog. [Read Day 1]

Pageflakes is a beautiful web site. There are two things I personally like better at Pageflakes than at the Google homepage. The first is that Pageflakes is just nice to look at. Its design is cleaner, therefore the modules (or flakes as they're called) are nicer to look at. Second, Pageflakes has a better programming methodology than the Google homepage. It's much more flexible. If you're developing (or thinking about developing) a module for the Google homepage, you should also look at the Pageflakes API documentation. If you do it right, you can probably re-use a lot of the code between the two sites.

The only reason that I didn't list Pageflakes before the Google homepage is traffic. Pageflakes doesn't generate nearly the level of traffic for me as the Google homepage. As they grow and become more well known, that may change. The Pageflakes site lends itself to strong self-promotion and internal growth because each page that you set up for yourself can be published globally. This means that you can use Pageflakes to build information pages, doorway pages or overview pages for your site or blog. Take a look at the page I created in just ten minutes: click here. In ten minutes I was able to put together a professional looking web page with links to relevant information about me, my favorite web bookmarks (from del.icio.us), my local weather and an Alexa traffic graph comparing my site with Pageflakes. I'm sure you can think of a way to use Pageflakes to promote yourself.

Pageflakes also has a referral-based affiliate program that should lend to its growth.

So, if you're going to build a module, you should definitely consider taking the time to make sure that it will also work with Pageflakes. For a little added effort up front, you may capture visitors different from those who use the Google homepage.