Website Failures, what are the causes?
Obviously there is a lot that can be said about both website failures and website successes. The purpose of this article is to learn from the mistakes of those others so that we may increase our chances of success. Here’s why they failed.
Spending Too High
In the vast majority of cases, the biggest website failures wasted large amounts of money. Websites like eToys.com (domain name now owned by Toys R Us) and Kibu.com (now defunct) were short-lived, even though they had huge sums of money to begin with. Income just could not keep up with spending.
Hired Too Many People
One of the things that most successful site owners agree upon is, “The fewer the employees a company has, the better off they will be.” Now obviously this is not the case for all sites but in the early stages it is important to keep things in perspective. Let your sales dictate your growth.
Lacking Search Engine Optimization
It wasn’t just that companies spent too much money. They spent it on the wrong things. Instead of hiring a search engine optimization expert, they spent a lot of money on advertising.
In the past, organic search engine optimization has worked really well. Believe it or not, it still works today, there’s just more competition.
The CEOs of most of the failed sites knew nothing about SEO. Make sure you learn as much as possible about search engine optimization. You want to understand both on page and off page optimization strategies.
Bad Ideas To Start With
Maybe you remember one website called Flooz.com. The idea was
to create an alternative form of online currency. Huh? It
didn’t work. It was simply a bad idea.
Problematic Websites Were Built
From lack of user-friendliness to long load times, bad designs are some of the most common causes of website failures. It has always been the sites that are simple, easy to use and “neat” that become popular and successful.
Too Much Competition
Before you enter into any kind of business venture, always evaluate the competition. Prior to the dotcom bubble and its demise, there was very little competition.
Many companies banked on the future of the internet; hoping to be the first ones online with their particular product.
Little or No Content
Little or no content is the main reason so many websites fail today. There are thousands of site/companies that have great products to sell but poor search engine rankings. You and I both know that a poor ranking on the internet spells and eventual demise.
The question then becomes why the poor ranking?
Great content helps create the necessary backlinks. If your
site has great content, others will want to link to it. If others
link to it, Google will begin to view it as an authority. The
more of an authority you become, the more traffic you will
receive. The more traffic you receive, the less likely you will
ever have to deal with website failures.
