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The real secret is: You web site has to be useful. The problem with the secrets I just meantioned is that they’re too specific, leading people to build sites that were in many cases inappropriate. Sure, links are important to Yahoo!, but they’re much less so to the vast majority of web sites. If you own an entertainment site, you may want to make it cool and entertaining. Certainly community can be an effective tool, but not every site has to have it. Content is very important, too – especially from a search engine perspective – but many successful Web sites don’t have much content. (I talk in more detail about content in the next section because it’s a special case.) When you’re planning your Web site, think about what kinds of folks you want to attract to the site. Then try to come up with ideas about what features and information might be useful to them. Your site may end up with a lot of link pages, providing a directory of sorts for people in your industry. Or maybe you really need a cool entertaining site. Or perhaps you decide to use discussion groups and chat rooms as a way to build community and pull the crowds into your site; that’s fine. Or maybe you decide to create a huge repository of information to attract a particular type of customer to your site. That’s’s okay, too Maybe you do all these things. But the important first step is to think about what you can do to make your site more useful.
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The Evolving "Secret"
Over the last decade, a number of popular ideas about what makes a successfull Web site have been bandied around, and all were wrong to some degree. Here are some of those Secrets to successful Web sites:
Links: When the Web began booming in 1994, it was all about links. You would hear in the press that the secret to a successful Web site was linking to other sites.
Cool: Then people started saying that the secret of success was to make your site cool. Cool sites were more entertaining and more likely to attract repeat visitors. Community: Then people started talking about community; yeah, that's right, that's the secret! The secret to a successful Web site was creating a community where people would meet and chat with each other. Content: Then, around 2000, people discovered that the secret was content. By putting more stuff, particulary textual information, on your site, you could be more successful. The real secret is... |
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