How to make a Nomad Site
I had a lot of trouble coming up with exactly what I wanted this site to be. I had the name, I knew what I wanted to call it. But what to write about? My other nomad sites I have a targeted topic in mind. But nomadicnation.com I have had the longest, for years, since all the way back when I was in highschool. I really loved the name and I wanted this one to be special, to somehow tie together everything else.
I know, coming up with the domain first and what to do with it later may seem a bit like putting the cart before the horse. But Nomadic Nation just has a nice ring to it, to me anyway. Maybe it’s just the alliteration, but I really wanted this site to work, and the name just seems to reach out and include a wide range — a nation — of ideas.
Originally I wondered if maybe I should just use this to aggregate the other microsites that I was planning on putting up. With my tech news niche site and my photo news and tutorials sites (both, at the time of this writing, to be launched soon) and any other sites that I come up with in the nomadic nation of sites displaying all their stories and headlines here.
After I considered for a while, I decided that I wanted this site to be more than just an aggregation of feeds from other sites. And I did not want another rambling blog without focus. I didn’t even want it to be too blog-like at all. I wanted this site to stand on its own and have its own voice, its own content. But what then? Not political news. Despite the nation ringing in the title, I’m wanting to stay away from anything political on this site, at least for now. I want to be more inclusive than that. I want to write about what people want to read about.
That’s when it hit me. To write about what you people want to read about, I will simply write about what I want to read about. Not a rambling blog…but all the interesting information that you (if you’re reading this site) and I want to read about. The kind of things you find yourself staying up until 4am watching that documentary on the Discovery Channel or local PBS station, or the kind of things that you wonder about, the kind of interesting questions we all had as children about the world and how it works, but gave up trying to find out.
That’s my focus, then. Interesting news and facts, history, science, mysticism. Learning about new places and things. This will be my excuse to look up all those things — every question that my stepson asks, every ‘I wonder why…’, all the fascinating stories that we want to learn more about. And with every article, I will provide some sources for more information, some fun things to read or videos to watch to find out more. Also, check out the nomadbytes — interesting news and stories from around the web.
And so here it is. For all of you late night documentary watchers, for all you people who occasionally look things up in the encyclopedia, and for those of you who may have, even against your will, ever found yourself accidentally becoming interested in one of those ‘boring’ educational videos they made you watch in school. This is for all of you, and me.
