Website Design Tips - Hypergurl

Making a successful website

One of the most important ingredients for a successful website isn’t anything to do with the design itself. It’s passion! By passion, I’m referring to the passion the owner has for the website content. Take Bill Gates for example, it’s clear to see he is passionate about technology. In every photograph taken of him or on every publicized speaking engagement he does, you can see the excitement in his face and in his eyes.

Passion is what will keep you working on your website when your receiving less than a hundred visitors a day, or when Google decides to place your pages in supplemental results or even worse drops them altogether.

Making a website successful takes time. It’s never as easy as uploading 100 website pages and seeing a flood of visitors the next day, week or year for that matter. Any webmaster who has been around for a while will tell you that it takes at least 2 years for most websites to start gaining popularity and decent visitor numbers. Unfortunately two years is also the average up-time for most websites before calling it quits. I like to call it the two year itch.

To ensure your website doesn’t become a victim of the two year itch, ask yourself these important questions:

(1) Will you still be as passionate about your websites content in two, five or even ten year’s time? If your website is about video games for example, can you imagine yourself still playing, reading and writing about video games in ten years time?

(2) Are you willing to continue adding to the content of your website daily even if search engines never list it in their index? Simply for the fun of it or for the excitement you have for the topic.

(3) Would you continue adding to your websites content if you knew you were never going to make a dollar from it?

(4) Can you see yourself living, breathing and waking up each morning simply for the passion and excitement you have for the content of your website?

Sadly, in a world of affiliate marketing there was thousands if not millions of websites that were haphazardly thrown together for the sole purpose of reaping financial benefits and not because the webmaster had a passion for the topic.

Take this scenario for instance:

Surfing through the Internet you discover it’s possible to make a few bucks by reselling PC games. You think to yourself, I’m not an avid player of PC games, in fact I hardly ever play them. But darn it, if I’m going to be paid for each game sold then why not have a go?

You get busy putting together a website without any knowledge of what age group buys PC games or which style of game is widely popular. You browse through the list of games available. AH ‘House Termites’, that sounds like a humorous one. I’ll put that game on my website. Not ever playing the game yourself, you simply copy and paste the text available from the main game website. ‘Well that was easy’ you think to yourself and continue doing this for another 60 games. A few weeks down the track you find Google has listed your website in ‘supplementary results’ most likely due to duplicate content which you’ve learned is bad for future visitor numbers. A year down the track you’re getting virtually no visitors which means no profits from selling games. What visitors you do get are asking themselves “where are all the good games?” No profits means you’ve lost interest in adding new content to the site and it’s starting to look out of date and stale until you finally give up on the site altogether.

So here’s my next question:

Why waste your time, unless of course, you’ve started with a passion?