Why Websites Die
For any web designer, as for any person, it is pleasant, if his work live, work and benefits. On the other hand, it is a pity to remove “dead” projects from the portfolio, at which you worked, invested in power, creativity and idea. But today the project is not needed to the network community, nor to the customer. How does it happen and whose fault is it?
There are different situations. There are those where the life cycle of the website is really minimal, how it was provided. For example, doorways and satellites are resources that are running in a network with a single purpose – to get visitors and redirect them to the main site, which is optimizing. When such a satellite or a doorway is no longer useful, he will be excluded from the search engines index and everybody will forget about it. The project has completed its task and can disappear now.
Other web sites with short life cycles are the sites that belong to newborn in web design. Almost all beginners in the field start with developing his home page and placing it on free hosting. Beginners do not even wonder about what will be the life cycle of a project created by them, what will be the audience, whether he has something useful to say to the networked world and whether he will develop and promote his site in future. But it is not too terrible. These sites also completed their mission – educational, informative for those who plan to continue working in web development and testing for the doubters. Therefore nobody expect that the life cycle of such websites should be different.
However, as soon as work on any serious project begins, it is not expected that it will die within a year. Just the contrary – important tool for the company development is created, much money are invested – from paying for the domain name and hosting to spending on salaries of designers and programmers. But before the project starts the customer does not think about simply question- what I do and why? Such customers often do not even know what information should be placed on the site, and expect some kind of action from developers. And by the way, these customers are more likely to spend much more time that needed to discuss the visual design of the site, fooling the developer, expressing dissatisfaction over another of blue buttons or faulty banner in the top. And all that the project has is design. There are no ideas, no tasks. There are nothing to read on this site for potential partner and for potential buyer as well. Later nothing changes – new texts, new content on the site will be not formed. So the designer will sadly remove one more “dead” project from his list.
Grand disappointments come when large service is developing ineptly, when a fair amount of money, six months or a year of time, rather big group of developers efforts are spent. In order to make any non-standard solution, first of all a thorough analysis is required, which is just ignored by many customers. Only after appears the fact that there is no need in such a service, the idea is outdated, the service itself is competing with the famous giant and it’s impossible to break into the market through its head in any way, and the service have no original feature, which would distinguish it from competitors. Inadequate goal, suboptimally chosen technology, the lack of a successful marketer in the project, an experienced technologist, overreliance on the visual component of the service – all this will force the death of the project.
So if you plan to develop your project or if you charge for the project development for your customer, pay attention to the marketing component, such as market analysis, audience analysis, clear understanding of project objectives, a clear vision of how to promote the project after its implementation, how it will be maintained and used.
This article was created by Web4you Inc. We are a well-established Edmonton web design, web development and SEO company Edmonton. Web4you also provides mobile app developing and hosting services. Web4you – Get IT done right!