Web Coder Plus

Look at the list of the most famous companies that survived the dot com bubble bursting, and you see the likes of Google, Amazon.com, and EBay. All these companies to some extent started to use web-2.0-esque methods (Google page rank, Amazom.com customer reviews) long before anyone had thought to call it web 2.0, and sometimes one can get the feeling that this has lead to a little too much optimism in the current web 2.0 craze.

I think however, that thing that made all of these companies successfull was word of mouth. There were many companies with huge venture capital funded ad drives, almost no one remembers them; except passingly, when reading a list of failed dot com companies. Compare that to Amazon.com, who’s name was the answer for a question on Jeopardy in July 1999; you cannot buy that kind of publicity (well maybe you can, but it’ll cost you more money than you likely have).

So what did they do right?

They gave the customer what they wanted, and they focused on designing their sites to help the customers achieve it. Now while I’d never suggest copying Amazon.com as a good user design, they don’t tend to do anything purely because the technology is there. Every addition was to help the user choose more books, and share books he/she liked with others.

Google provided search. What made them different from so many other search engines at the time was the simplicity of their site. They knew that someone using a search engine wanted to seach for web sites, they didn’t want their search to be hidden under a pile of flashing graphics, slowed down by thousands of pointless javascripts. They wanted good search results, and while the technology that provided them was revolutionary (at least in the search engine field), the user didn’t need to know that, they just needed to see the result. Users were so impressed with the results, that they returned, often; then suggested Google to their friends, who suggested it to theirs, etc.

I could go on, but I think it’s pretty clear. “If you build it, they will come” does not always hold true. Advertising may bring the numbers in, but it doesn’t keep them there. Understanding what users want, however, and doing only what will help you achieve that, will get you a long way towards success, and on a much smaller budget.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 11:40 am and is filed under Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.