Five Critical Qualities For Online Success
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by: Guest
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Conceiving, building and operating a website is a real multi-disciplinary challenge for an individual or small organization. At any given time you might be called upon to do a spot of graphic design, become a network specialist, a marketing guru, a business person and sometimes even a programmer. With the inevitable thrills and spills of bringing a new website into the world, it\'s sometimes easy to forget what is truly important for success...
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Efficiency
Having a successful website and operating it successfully are not necessarily the same thing. One of the most common downfalls with any new business is a failure to properly appreciate what software and technologies are available to make life easier and more efficient. Many businesses run successfully by manually performing tasks well suited for automation - there are so many examples of this that it is more useful to speak about it abstractly.
Most repetitive tasks can likely be far more efficiently accomplished using software than manual labour.
The point I'm making here is that one should always analyze what type of work is being done manually and ask how it could be done reliably by your website or other applications. You might find that instead of costing you several hours of costly labour each day, a given task could be done in minutes at no expense with the right software.
Flexibility
I personally value flexibility in any type of operation very highly - Darwin should really have talked about survival of the most adaptable. As in nature, your website or online business stands a better chance of succeeding in the long run if you are able to easily modify and change it as new circumstances arise. Being tied into a technology that does not move with the times, or worse, does not allow you to work on without the support of so-called qualified personnel is a sure fire way to put a life expectancy stamp onto any project.
Scalability
The importance of having a website that will scale should the need ever arise is something that is never important, until that one time when you really need. But when you do need it, you have to have it otherwise, a potential meteoric rise to fame and fortune could splutter and die as you scramble to try and keep up with growing traffic volumes.
By knowing the limitations of your web server and the website itself, and researching what actions should be taken to increase your operation seamlessly ahead of time, you can ensure that any large, sustained growth in traffic will be met with a directed and focused plan of action. Being able to move from a small website with perhaps only a few hundred visitors to something much larger without suffering downtime or having to undertake major redesigns can mean the difference between success and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Reliability
Ok, this one should really be a no brainer - at least from the point of view of your readers or customers. No one will remain loyal to a website if it is consistently unreliable. In fact, it is a fairly well known phenomenon that websites undergoing upgrades to meet increased demand find themselves no longer in need of said upgrades because the downtime of the website forced traffic elsewhere.
There are other aspects of reliability that affect you, as the webmaster. Make sure you partner with reliable businesses. A good hosting service that actually does meet its 99% uptime guarantee and provides prompt support allows you to pass that reliability on to your customers and readers.
Predictability
This final point differs from the previous ones in that it applies solely to how your website interacts with visitors. It's not something that you can work on over time behind the scenes. A website has to behave in a predictable manner because, in the eyes of a visitor:
a website that doesn't behave as they expect is indistinguishable from a website that is broken
Admittedly this has varying degrees of applicability depending on the type of site in question. Most blogs, for example, are fairly straight forward and people expect to be able to read content on a given subject matter - nothing too hard to botch up there. For those people offering services or products the situation becomes a lot more difficult, because your website has to build an expectation and meet it precisely.
If you represent aspects of your service or product ambiguously or unclearly it can lead to real problems as paying customers become frustrated or aggravated because your service or product "doesn't work properly". It's not as easy as it sounds to make a website completely predictable for everyone. The best way is to spend a lot of time planning your content and keeping everything simple and concise.
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