What is the purpose of your site?
Here’s one of those ‘less talk, more listen’ posts. You don’t get many from me! I want to know a bit about your websites and your approach and attitude towards their purpose. Is your site(s) designed to make money, inform and educate, publicise a product/service/person or is the purpose unclear – perhaps it’s just for fun. For each case, how do you achieve your goals?
Design and Usability
How does your site design contribute to the end goal? With regards to user experience, what do you feel takes priority – enabling visitors to get to where they need to be as quickly as possible, or to provide an enjoyable experience. Or both? And how do you go about achieving this?
How much do you feel design contributes towards the overall user experience? Would you prefer a site that is easy to navigate and view, with well written copy and clear structure but features a minimal or unattractive design? Or would you rather a beautiful looking site with fancy dynamic functionality and gimmicks, but ‘makes you think’ a more? What about a balance of the two. How do you feel you can work to create a website that is fantastically well structured and presented, whilst revealing some tasty eye-candy?
Measuring success
How do you measure your site’s success? What do you determine to be ‘success‘? Site traffic? Perhaps a deeper look at your site’s analytis; what do you feel takes precedence? Length of visit, repeat visits, countires visited from, pure volume of traffic? How do these statistics vary depending on your site’s purpose? Perhaps you feel the best measure of your site’s success is more organic than statistical – the comments you receive, RSS or email subscribers, contact form feedback or a combination of the lot.
What do you feel is more important; your visitors experience or the site stats and revenue made?
I want your opinions
Please take the time out to comment below. This post isn’t about me or Redswish, I want to know what other people think. Get your site URL in there to get some coverage. I’ll be summing up everyone’s responses in an article in a few weeks.
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Stephen Hill said:
Hi Nathan,
I started my personal website only 4 months ago and although I’ve been around on the web for a long time, I’ve never really had my own permanent website.
The end goal for my website was two fold:
- Get a presence on the web
- Improve my writing skills
In order to focus on the latter, I created a very simple and easy to read website. No fancy graphics or animations, just a simple two column layout. The left hand menu has hold the navigation and the right hand column holds the content. This, I feel, help me concentrate on the contents rather than any eye-candy.
How do I measure how successful the site is? That’s a hard one really. I guess I measure it from the amount of comments through to the number hits the site gets.
I hope this is useful information.
Cheers
Stephen
Mike said:
My personal site is essentially there so that my domain name wasn’t just for my email and because I needed a home for my hunt for Nick Gilbert.
Its success for me can be measured in two ways:
- the opinion of one of my peers
- was the CSS at least a little bit interesting to write
Santhos Webdesign said:
My website is about our webdesign company. It’s a very competitive brand. We tried to be different by using a nature like theme. Keeping it all as structured and clear as possible. Text is a very important thing to bind visitors I believe. I keep working and experimenting on that.
Paul Stevens said:
just starting it off again armed with a bit more knowledge then before.
predominately to have some fun and learn, as well as build up a habit of doing a blog daily. chance to build time management skills and such.
the actual content works as skill building, so its a win win situation all around, and if someone else enjoys the site, then thats an added bonus.
Website ROI | Anjolie said:
The site I’m working on prelinkbuilding for as its development is an alternate brand identity for lead generation. (Commerce Chemist). The goal is to generate leads for more lucrative and longer term contracts for conversion rate optimization and related services.
I judge success for this site and for my clients based on Traffic x Conversion Rate versus profitability. Really its about establishing a goal and continuing to monitor progress.
Malcolm said:
Well success of any website is entirely dependent on its visitors. A website can not think to last long if it is forcing visitors to get hits by fooling them. I think Visitors Experience should be the prime concern. Because once they are satisfied with the content you are offering they will definitely want to revisit your site.
As far as the design is concerned, it has to be eye soothing. Well designed websites always leaves the good impact on the mind of the visitor. But at the same time content should be there because that’s the thing for which visitors come to your site first. So if you have good graphics and the well structured content…”You are a winner.”
John McFarlane said:
My site my made as i started learning about web design as a change of career, it’s in need of an overhaul but its just a place for me to be on the web and maybe gain some clients which will help me gain experience in this industry.
aroopk said:
I am a total newbie and am experimenting on my website with almost haphazard content, content management software and SEO stuff that I learn online. I will divert whatever I learn to something more concrete soon. It will be good have some comments by the way.
aroopk said:
hey.. was just wondering.. why does this article has a pic of an ostrich?
nathan said:
@aroopk hehe I can’t remember! There must have been some metaphor behind it at the time but I’ve completely forgotten now!
Cr8tive said:
Really… its very important to keep in mind the basic purpose of the website…never let your site get lost in the crowd…try doing something that binds your users and visitors to your website…
pixeldope said:
hmm…true..why is the website made and what is the purpose has to be answered.
Moving Quotes said:
I manage a forum at http://www.mapforums.com. I work with GIS and mapping software, and for me it is a way to keep a pulse on the latest developments and also to have an audience of potential customers and clients. Finally, the adsense revenue is about $15 per day which adds up.
Eric
http://www.mapforums.com