Building a Website Prototype for Online Success
I’ve developed a lot of sites over the years and one of the first sites was a fishing site that sells advertising. This site was originally designed as a learning experience. Let me tell you the story…
My first site was for a large land developer in Colorado. Quite the client for a first project. I poured my heart and soul into the project, determined to create an amazing product for them. You see, I didn’t want my client to know that they were my first guinea pig. Every designer has had their first client. You know what I’m talking about. I put more work into that site than just about any other, except for the fishing site I mentioned earlier. The land developers loved the site when they saw it for the first time. They told everyone they knew and the site was flooded with visitors for a few days, and then…nothing. The heartbeat of this once lively site was dead. As soon as the initial flood of self-generated traffic died off, the site sat there silent, crickets chirping.
I was nervous. I hoped my clients wouldn’t notice. But eventually they did. Sure it took about 3 months before they said anything but then I had to deal with it head-on. They were disappointed and so was I. I had held up my end of the bargain. All they asked for was a website, nothing more. I hadn’t promised a website that actually got visitors, but I should have and I felt guilty.
I felt like, although I delivered what I was asked to do, I hadn’t delivered everything I had hoped. I guess I was ignorant. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. It never even occured to me, in those infantile days, that I should consider how to build a site that actually got traffic. I didn’t even know, at that point, that I had any control over the traffic itself. I was pretty green. Let’s face it, I didn’t know much at all. About the only think I knew for sure was that I needed to know more. I couldn’t move forward as a designer and collect more money from new clients knowing that I was experimenting on them. I just couldn’t live with myself. So I took a year off and built ActiveAngler.com. The site proved to be the best education I could have ever gotten.
I knew I wanted to learn how to build a site that got traffic and how to build a site that kept visitors longer than the best fishing sites and one that got the visitors to come back again and again. Some pretty tall orders. After negotiating with hundreds of professional fishermen, I narrowed my authors down to 75 guys from around the world. I allowed these top-notch fishing guides to submit their articles to me to post on the site, free of charge. I never expected to get more than 750 articles right off the bat. Suffice it to say, I had a ton of great content and I didn’t pay a penny for any of it.
Organizing the content became a full-time job in itself. My site map took up an entire wall in my tiny office. I compiled images and stream flow reports, fish recipes, tips, advice and more. Looking back, the greatest feat was that I developed the entire site using a 56k modem. I can’t imagine working at that speed today. I remember that there were times that I’d wait for an hour to upload and test a batch of files. In fact, I kept another computer on my desk just to trade stocks and options while I was waiting for my mac to process the files.
In the end, I was able to accomplish a lot with that mac. With no money ever spent on advertising, I built a prototype for a successful website that still to this day serves as the model for how to build a successful website. I accomplished my goals of getting people to the site, getting them to stay at the site and getting them to come back to the site. In fact, the site still gets between 5000 and 10,000 visitors a day and it’s pretty much been ignored for the past 10 years.
It’s amazing to me that the web has evolved so much since its inception but those 3 basic elements are still central to the success of any site. Eliminate or ignore even one of those pieces and your site will fail. Think about it. If you fail to get people to the site, your site will be lost in cyberspace. Fail to get people to stay on the site and it makes no difference how many people you attracted to the site. Fail to get them to come back and you’ll likely lose the chance for any sale because people rarely buy on their first visit. Sure, you might be thinking that I’m just talking about ecommerce websites but I’m talking about every type of site from B2B to B2C to B2G sites. People rarely buy on their first visit. Even if you’re not selling anything online, you still need to get people to come back to your site to build rapport and get them to contact you. The key to repeat traffic is conversion. You have to think about how you’re going to convert them into a customer at some point. From the moment they hit your site, you should have conversion at the forfront of your mind. We’ll cover conversion techniques in detail in the future. For now, focus on the 3 goals and build yourself a prototype that you can use again and again.
Hope that helps.
