SEO Services, technology and web design

Written on May 15, 2009 – 4:31 pm | by admin |

Written by John Cole The Hook

A website needs a draw, some reason for people to come visit it again and again. For commerce sites its simple, a good or service is offered and visitors come to purchase the good or service. Things are trickier for a non-commerce site though. They need something else…the hook.

The hook is simple in practice. It is something unique that your site offers that no other site does. But on the internet this can be daunting. Every day hundreds of sites are born, each with their little hooks out, trying to gain visitors, and more importantly trying to retain them. So how do you make your hook stand apart from the rest? Follow me as I take you on a tour of what I would do starting a new site.

Research

Research is the backbone of any successful site. In my experience this is the step that is skipped more than any other in coming up with a successful site idea. When you come up with a great idea, hop over to your favorite search engine and start researching it. Don’t just search for one phrase, try to think of anything and everything that someone would type in to try to find your site. For our example we will be starting a site about restaurants.

First off I sit down with a blank piece of paper (yes paper, I know, low tech) and list every possible phrase that has to do with restaurants. Some of phrases I come up with are:

• Restaurant reviews
• Restaurant cuisine
• Restaruant atmosphere
• etc…

 

I take my various search phrases and run them through search engines and check out the sites that pop up. I will probably run through a half dozen search engines before I am done, clicking on anything that I think looks interesting. A nice feature that google has that can help with this is the search similar link after each result. This can help speed up your search. When you finish with this you should have a pretty decent idea of what is out there related to your idea.

Differentiate

Now that I’ve found a bunch of sites about restaurants I can figure out what I am going to do that is different than what everyone else is doing. After looking through all of the sites I decide that I haven’t seen much in the way of a community site where people can post reviews of restaurants in their local area and share them with others. Kind of like reviews on Amazon, but for restraurants.

KISS

Keep it simple stupid. We all know the mantra. We’ve all been to the sites that try to do too much and fail at everything. The secret to a great site is that it finds one thing, and does that better than anywhere else. For our site I decide that I want it to be a place that you can go search for a type of restarant in your area and find it along with any reviews from people who have eaten there.

That’s it. Notice I said nothing about color schemes, site designs, logos or even a name. In the end those things are all secondary (though still important). If the hook is good enough…then those things only matter if they don’t work. But no amount of beautiful design will make a worthless site viable. So before you call your web designer (hopefully me) up to discuss a new site you want to work on, go through these steps first. It will help you on your way to creating a great site that brings in, and retains many visitors.

As an aside this article illustrates another important point. Ideas are cheap, to the point that you can pretty much give them away for free. If you think the idea for restaurant site like I described is a great idea, go for it. Just make sure you go through the steps. Good luck!

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I am a Graphic and Web designer who specializes in helping companies create a coherent brand that can help them stand out from the crowd. You can see my work at >cruciald.com.