Excellent Tips: 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website (plus one more)

Categories: Web StrategyPosted on September 28th, 2006

Great summary of all the key learnings from the Future of Web Apps conference in SF, I think this is well categorized and hits many of the major points. Read and print out 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website. I’d like to extend this list just slightly

EASY is the most important feature of any website, web app, or program
Visual design and copy are extremely important.
Open up your data as much possible.
Test, test, test.
Release features early and often.
Be special
Don’t be special.
If you plan on developing a successful webapp, plan for scalability
Watch, pay attention to, or implement right away:
User generated content and social software trends

I’d like to add the following:

11) Revenue. I sound evil, but it’s true, and something every investor, partner, and your father in law will ask about. As I understand it there are six potential revenue models: Advertising, Premium, Transaction, Consultation, Partnering and Acquisition. While I agree the best sites come from passion (I make no direct dollars from this passion web strategy blog) putting food on the table for your family is important.

Resources: My notes from the conference are here for day 1 and day 2, I can really appreciate the work that AUinteractive did for these top 10 points.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 6:32 am and is filed under Web Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

Markus

Good call, Jeremiah. I was baffled by the person at the summit who kept insisting that a good differentiator would be producing content without ads (as opposed to content with ads).

Acquisition should never be considered the primary goal. It seems like some startups are making this mistake as we speak. It's like relying on winning the lottery for retirement-planning.

Allen

Hi Jeremiah,

I think your point about revenue is very valid. I don't think you sound evil. I ask myself about whether CN can generate revenue and if so, how. I think your six models is very well thoughtout because most people think of either: ads or subs. But there are many other ways as you note.

I am disappointed that I didn't have a chance to meet you in SF. Maybe next time!

-- Allen

Markus

My first comment was lost after I submitted, so I'll try again...

You bring up a good point. I was really dumbfounded when the guy at the conference kept insisting (or at least strongly suggesting) that "having no ads" is a killer differentiator in the market.

If you have attention and you have traffic, its very easy to monetize that since those are probably the most important things to have in today's attention economy. So as long as you're not incurring high costs, it not that hard to make money.

It seems like some web 2.0 startups (the ones whos who are burning VC capital as we speak) are focusing on acquisition as their primary strategy, which is a little like betting on lottery winnings to finance your retirement.