Dani of DaniWeb Tells Tale of Website Triumph

Dani Horowitz, founder and namesake of DaniWeb, opened up recently to W3Reports for an exclusive interview regarding her site’s rise to fame and how she pioneered it all.

Horowitz is a college student living in the hustle and bustle of New York City, managing a computer science degree, and running a website (http://www.daniweb.com) that serves roughly 2 million page views each month.

Question: Why did you start DaniWeb?
During the sophomore year of my computer science degree, I was talking with a friend about how our school doesn’t provide free tutoring for our major, as they do for other degrees on campus. We thought it might be a good idea to develop a resource for computer students to share ideas and get help and support from each other online.

As I progressed with my degree, I started getting more heavily into Linux, which prompted me to frequently browse JustLinux.com, a popular Linux forum. (In fact, we’re extremely lucky to currently have two JustLinux moderators on the DaniWeb moderating team). I learned a lot from the site and started turning into a forum junkie. About that time, I decided to open up a site called TechTalk Forums. It was a simple YaBB! Perl forum covering Windows, Linux, hardware, and a bit of programming. The first tutorials to appear on the site were my class notes from the first year of my computer science degree. In fact, the same tutorials still appear in the C++ section of DaniWeb, today.

Despite an upgrade to phpBB, TechTak Forums never took off at all. The following year, I decided to relaunch the community as DaniWeb. We moved to vBulletin, sported a new site design and logo, and an entirely new forum structure. This also sparked the birth of our web development forums. It didn’t take long for the site to catch on.

Question: What factor do you think contributed the most to DaniWeb's exceptional growth?
Our moderators have played a huge role in the development of the site. Without them, I don’t know where we’d be.

We also have a huge advantage that makes us unique, which has really helped. When I started DaniWeb, all of the webmasters of the world were screaming that only niche sites work. I set out to prove them wrong – and create something different in the process. We opted to go for a broad site, focusing on all aspects of I.T..

Unlike networks of sites, we’re a one stop resource that puts everything all together in one community. At the same time, we build up each individual forum as if it were a sub-site in and of its own. This encourages members who may have expertise in one area but not another to continue to explore new territory and learn, because the fear of being the uneducated newbie who doesn’t know anyone is eliminated. Instead, members feel more comfortable exploring new areas of the site and learning because they already belong to the community.

Question: Where do you see DaniWeb in 1 year?
I can’t really answer that. As of is right now, DaniWeb is only a year and a half old, and look how far we’ve come! My original goal when I started was to have one-hundred members. Now we’re lucky enough to have one-hundred members joining our community everyday. At this point, we’re taking it one day at a time.

I’d like to be able to eventually match other high-traffic I.T. sites, but I don’t want to be limited by a goal. Our (cheesy but appropriate) motto is, “Make everyday better than yesterday.”

Question: If you could change one thing about your website, what would you change, and why?
I’m changing so many things every day, it’s hard to pick something specific. I’m definitely a workaholic when it comes to DaniWeb. I’m constantly browsing other I.T. communities and sites on the Internet, seeing and experimenting with what works and what doesn’t. I definitely think that I change at least a couple of different aspects – albeit minor ones at times – nearly everyday.

Question: What is your favorite part of running DaniWeb?
How much I have learned! I started this endeavor as an apprehensive computer science student, not knowing what on earth I wanted to do when I graduated.

I’ve made so many contacts in the I.T. Industry from DaniWeb, and learned so much about Internet marketing, web development, PHP, MySQL, etc. I’ve finally decided that I want to pursue an MBA when I finish my degree. And of course, continue to work on DaniWeb, perhaps even fulltime someday. The site has also helped fund my education. I always felt that computer science courses were too theoretical to ever be applicable to the real world. But I definitely have found many of the skills I’ve learned in school helpful to the back-end development of the site (i.e. PHP coding). DaniWeb has definitely had a huge impact on my life.

Question: Do you have any plans for DaniWeb in the near future?
There really isn’t anything I have in the works right now. I do all the marketing, design, and backend development for DaniWeb myself, in addition to being the community’s sole administrator. When we roll out a new feature, it is often a spur of the moment thing. For example, I remember surfing the web one Friday night at one a.m. and thinking that having blogs would be a cool feature. By that Monday, there were blogs.

Question: What advice would you give to owners of new websites who wish to follow in your footsteps?
When I started TechTalk Forums, I got literally no traffic. The second month the site was open, we had one new post over the course of the entire month. That was not too long ago!

Since then, I’ve put in many hundreds of hours of development, and have never let up. It’s really paid off. By coming up with one single unique idea for your website, and running with it, it can really make your site. Even something so simple as diversifying an I.T. forum. It isn’t the most creative thing in the world to say, “Let’s create an I.T. network with a single login and a single community,” and yet that was all it took to make us unique enough to grow.

Spend a lot of time reading code and learning about your forum software. By doing your own development work, you can implement your ideas exactly how you dream it.

Question: Do you have any regrets about DaniWeb?
If there’s something that I don’t like about DaniWeb, it’ll be changed by tomorrow. I’m so lucky to have such a great team of moderators who take the burden off of constantly keeping up with the community. This lets me focus on the administrative tasks, marketing the site, managing the financial aspects, and doing all of the development work when we roll out new features. When I have time, I can relax and enjoy being a presence and participating in the community. That makes it very enjoyable, without the burden of having to constantly keep up with a quota of answering questions daily, in addition to all of my other tasks.

Question: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Only that I want to thank everybody who has made this possible. It doesn’t matter how much I do. Without the dedication and help of our members and moderators, we wouldn’t be where we are today.