Building A Successful Website

Building websites is a daunting task and most of us are always on the look out for ideas to make things better. Feeling frustrated with the amount of projects I am trying to work on right now, I thought I would go back to basics to see if it could help clarify my thinking slightly on what makes a website successful. As a task for this week, I thought we could try and think about what it is that makes some websites really popular and why others are left idle. Is it the content, the free stuff, the design? Here are some of the things that stand out as reasons why some websites work better than others.

Popularity

Strangely I often bookmark or subscribe to sites which simply look popular and have a lot of readers. My thinking is that if a site is popular then there is probably something interesting or useful I can learn, either from the content or the way the site is marketed. In my head I know this idea is stupid but we all tend to follow other people rather predictably. If everyone else is checking out this site then I should too right? Most people, including myself, have very short attention spans when browsing and so a lot of subscribers can send a message that this site might be worth checking out again. So basically a popular site can gain traffic simply because it is popular.

I think that there is a tipping point which all sites have to reach before they really start to explode in terms of visitors and readers. Once a website starts to build up a large number of incoming links and starts getting talked about regularly then growth will happen almost without effort. Once a site hits a certain level of popularity it will start to gain massive amounts of traffic, some of which will be converted into regular readers. I guess most websites and blogs just never make it to the level need for continued growth and so they eventually die out. Traffic is to websites what capital is to business. Without it they will just fall apart.

If you visit a site that has 10,000 readers then inevitably you are more likely to subscribe to it than to a site with only a few hundred subscribers. I don’t think there is always that much logic going on here but it is simply human nature at work. The same idea is true of forums and blog comments. No one wants to visit a community that seems dead and so for people starting out with forums or blogs, the first year is going to be spent desperately trying to get enough members for other people to start taking an interest. If you have ever tried building a forum for your website then you will know how frustrating it can be trying to get members to join during the first few months. I just set up a metal band and contraceptive forum this week and they are already proving to be a real headache to get started. It’s a catch 22 situation where no one wants to join until there are enough members there to make it worthwhile to do so.

Good design

Making a website work is all about standing out from the crowd. With a million and one sites all vying for our attention, a powerful aesthetic can make a huge difference to the success of a website. There are quite a few sites that I can think of where I can’t remember a thing about the content but the design always sticks in my head. Obviously it is worth spending a lot of time getting the design of a site right in the early stages and the more professional your site looks the better. I sometimes return to a site quite often just to take a look at the design and get some ideas for myself. I am sure there are many people who do the same thing.

If you don’t have the time to build your own Wordpress themes then you could check out either Woo Themes, who have some really good looking Wordpress themes, or the popular Affiliate theme.

Unique

For every niche and topic you are interested in there will be a thousand sites all trying to say the same things. The more unique a site is the more chance it has of standing out from the rest and gaining our attention. If a website is unusual or interesting it will have more chance of succeeding. There are always ways to make our sites more unique, we just have to dig deep to find them.

Value

I guess value is what a popular site is all about. Good blogs are like good businesses, they offer you value you cannot find anywhere else. The more value you can give to your readers, the more chance you have of them sticking around long enough to let your site take off. A good blog or website should give people something interesting to read, useful or controversial to think about.

Marketing

Without a good marketing campaign behind a website it is pretty hard to get noticed and that means it will be hard to draw in traffic. The more you market and promote your website, the more chance it will get noticed and the more quickly you can get the traffic and interest needed to succeed. So far I have experimented with article marketing, cross site promotion and search marketing but there are many other ways to promote your site that I just probably haven’t thought of.

There are many factors that go into producing and building a successful website and these are the most important ones I could think of. Feel free to comment if you can think of any that I have missed out.