Trim the Fat: Maintain Your Website's Focus
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Make sure your site offers exactly what it claims to offer instead of trying to have a site that offers everything to everyone or a web site whose purpose is obscured with too many features or irrelevant content. Examples of sites that do exactly what they say they do include Google and
Hot or Not.When I attended college as an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to take part in a writing workshop. The author who led the workshop, Robin Hemley, described a process that not only applies to writing, but also to web site production and just about anything. He described a process of going through a work of short fiction and eliminating as many sentences as possible. After that, he said to let it sit for an unlengthy period of time then repeat the process again on the already trimmed down story. This is to be done as many times as possible while still retaining the overall meaning of the story.
The point of this process is to strengthen the impact of the story by ridding it of extraneous details or information so that the essence of the tale can better shine through. Short stories need to be succinct and to the point because of the format. Typically readers of short fiction don’t want to spend a lot of time reading in one sitting. They want to experience the tale to its fullest then move on. Does this sound similar to another type of audience, an audience with mice in their hands? There is no audience more fickle than Internet users, and that is why implementing a process to strip away the fluff in order to leave the users of a site with exactly what the site purports to offer will in the long-run be more vital that trying to have a web site that offers everything to everyone or even a web site whose purpose is obscured with too many features or irrelevant content.
The example I will hold up as the glimmering beacon of ‘the process’ is Google. When someone visits Google they essentially see the web site logo and a textbox to perform a search. The total essential user interface consists of a textbox, a textbox worth forty billion dollars. That single textbox instantiated millions of times a day symbolizes the pragmatic beauty of the process at its best. This wasn’t an accident. In the recent Playboy interview with the founders of Google, they explain in their own words how the process is important:
Playboy: Many Internet companies were founded as portals. It was assumed that the more services you provided, the longer people would stay on your website and the more revenue you could generate from advertising and pay services.
Larry Page: We built a business on the opposite message. We want you to come to Google and quickly find what you want. Then we’re happy to send you to the other sites. In fact, that’s the point. The portal strategy tries to own all of the information.
In addition to Google, other sites that follow the process continually stand out as leaders in Internet entrepreneurship. Hot or Not draws millions of visitors and frenzied mouse-clicks. The theme of the site is self-evident: browse photos of people and click a number from one to ten to let them know if they are hot or not.
The site can be broken down almost completely into two actions: uploading a picture and clicking numbers over and over and over. Compare the success of Hot or Not to many other singles web sites with millions of venture-backed dollars and its simple to see that Hot or Not’s success came from presenting a clear, simple function and sticking to it. Visitors aren’t presented with horoscopes or dating tips. That information can be found all over the net. But where else can someone go to find out if they are hot or not? Nowhere.
Next: Yahoo! -- Everything Under the Sun >>
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