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I have the privilege of sitting next to some smart gents this Saturday as part of the Arriving and staying on the web panel session at the Create Conference 08, and one of the ideas I’d like to throw out there is the idea of turning your website inside out.

What I mean is this: say you were after a copy of the Rolling Stones’ Flowers album (hey, it’s got Ruby Tuesday on it, what a great song). Where would you go to get it? These days you might shop at iTunes, or Amazon, or countless other online avenues. Or you might scour some second-hand music stores. No doubt you would go to where music is available for sale.

Now say you had a copy of that album to sell. Would you keep it on the shelf and hope someone will knock on the door and ask to buy it? Unless your house is a famous music museum, you’re probably going to take out an ad somewhere where you know people will read ads for music to buy. Or maybe you’ll take it to the second-hand music store to sell. The point is: you would go to where people are who would want to buy it, to tell them about it.

Obvious? In my line of work, I often find that people build websites assuming that others will knock on their door to buy that album, then (understandably) get discouraged when it doesn’t sell.

Go to where people are

We should be taking the content of our websites to where people are already congregating, not just ads to try to get people to leave what they’re doing and visit our websites. There are so many websites around these days that thrive on communities sharing their content with each other. Whether it’s for fun, like photos and videos on facebook, MySpace and flickr, or to make a coin, like on Etsy or Threadless.

There are loads of opportunities for creative thinking to take our websites’ content ‘out of the house’ and into the street to where people can see it, engage with it, share it, have a conversation about it — be it to promote events, news, topical articles, relevant services and products — whatever you and your business have a passion for.

If you have an inbox, chances are by now you’ve been invited by someone to join Facebook and/or hook up as their friend on Facebook. And me, I can’t get enough of it! I and many of my friends are giving it a lot of love at the moment. And why not? There’s no better way to dig up (stalk?) old friends, and there’s a lot of toys (sorry, third-party applications) to play with as well.

I first heard about Facebook through a brother of mine who pestered me to get onto it. He graduated from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), which now, as it turns out, has its own Facebook dedicated server. Which makes sense, since it was first conceived for schools and universities as a way for alumni to keep/stay in touch.

Work/non-work personalities

But what of the whole work/non-work tension? Lee Hopkins writes about the dilemma of having a personal profile potentially (and embarrassingly?) available to your professional network as well as your non-professional circles. What if you’re going for a respectable job at a respectable company, and your potential boss finds you on your Facebook page as a beer-swilling hoon who’s into Primus, photographing road-kill and collecting traffic signs?

But hold on folks: I don’t think we need all this paranoia. Anyone who spends a few minutes on Facebook looking at a few pages will see the following: loads of photos of smiling people at parties, people on holiday, and pictures of their kids (and sorry you young ‘uns… more and more grown-ups are getting onto Facebook now, get used to it). There’s loads of ‘wall’ messages with friends saying hi and how are you.

It’s all very very normal.

I say be yourself; anyone you’re out to impress by being someone other than yourself is going to see the Real You eventually, aren’t they?