Here are a few quick and easy tips to remember about starting a website, which should make your website more successful.
1. Quality is better than Quantity
This tip can be put in several contexts. Content wise, if you have thousands of pages essentially saying “I’m great” in thousands of ways you have wasted your time creating them. Instead make a single easy to find page, which engages the user quickly and gets to the point.
Traffic wise, it’s better to have a small audience which engages with your content (or will pay for it) then a large audience who do not engage with your content and end up just increasing server costs. A notable example of a Company which has decided to focus on serving the 10% of their audience who will pay for content is News Corp.
2. Start Small
When you start you may want to do everything under the sun. Unfortunately in most cases this leads to websites stalling in development. For example many websites spend years “Under Construction” and when they are finally released their product or service is outdated or uncompetitive.
3. Focus on your Niche
Don’t try to be everything, otherwise your resources to provide a good product will too stretched. Instead focus on what you are interested in or what you are good at; your content will reflect this.
4. Test your website
I really cannot stress this enough. Having a website which is visually displeasing or fails to work will affect your long term performance. Make sure you check your website works in as many browsers as you can and if possible, get a friend to take a look at it.
You may find it useful to visit WebPagesThatSuck.com, for ideas on what not to do while making a website.
5. Be Creative
Do something unique, no one wants to see another knock off of Facebook or YouTube. Have something which is a solution to a problem on the internet. For example, Twitter stopped the need for people to post one line blog posts.
