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Ok so it's Thanksgiving over there in the United States ... and I could probably tell that without even looking at the calendar to see what the date is. How can I do that? It's simple ... my email spam box is almost empty because hardly anything came in overnight and that's the way it always is on Thanksgiving.

Says something about where most spam comes from doesn't it? Of course it could be that spammers in other parts of the world don't send any on Thanksgiving because they think that no one will read it ... but somehow I don't think they need to be that smart.

Speaking of being smart I wonder how many of us actually plan for the future when we're starting a new site? Here I'm not talking about a free site or gallery ... I'm talking about those sites that we're building for the future ... sites that will go on growing over time and ultimately become huge.

I'm sure that if we did think about what those sites would be like years down the track we'd be a whole lot more cautious in our choice of content management systems when we're actually starting the site. Of course we might not even think in terms of content management systems right at the start ... we may think that we can manage the growth of the site without any problems if we build it in straight HTML.

But if we are thinking in terms of content management systems do we pause to wonder if the system can manage to cope with a site that could grow to thousands and thousands of dynamic pages loaded with lots of images and attracting thousands and thousands of hits every day?

Earlier this week Steve flew interstate to do something he's always dreamed of doing ... I can't tell you just what it was because it's mainstream and we want to keep the two areas quite separate. But I can tell you that it was related to a blog Steve started four years ago.

On the trip Steve met up with a competitor who also started a similar website at about the same time using WordPress but since his site has been running he has added in thousands of pages and lots of images and it's become huge. Currently both he and his team ... yes, he has fulltime workers ... are adding anything up to 10 posts ... many of them over 1000 words in length ... almost every day and WordPress is beginning to groan under the strain.

With all that content and around 100k visitors a month WordPress is really struggling to cope. In fact there have been times when the site has been down for hours at a time almost every day for weeks.

It's not a good situation to be in and he knows that sooner or later the site will have to be migrated to some other platform ... something he didn't think would ever be necessary.

That means that there are going to be some difficult times ahead. Not only does he have to choose a platform that will grow as his site continues to he will have to look at how he will go about migrating those sites to the new platforms without any downtime and without losing search engine listings.

And that's a problem that Steve is also going to be facing within the next year or so because he runs a similar site on the WordPress platform.

Could either of them have foreseen the time when their sites would be so popular that they might be facing problems with the platform that they chose? Back then I know that Steve never thought that his site would grow this big ... but he certainly should have planned for it.

And that's what you should be doing as you build your empire. Plan for expansion ... have an expectation that your sites will grow and consider how you will manage your sites when they have outgrown the platform that you're building them on.

Of course back when the two sites that I've referred to here first started WordPress was about the only option but these days you need to have an expectation that better platforms will come along. You also need to keep in touch with developments as they happen so you won't be like Steve who is currently sitting in his office, scratching his head and wondering where he should start looking for a platform that will handle his site well into the future.

Plan for the future and you won't find yourself facing the same dilemmas that Steve is looking at right now.