When is a Website Not a Website?

d oes a website you've never seen or heard of really exist? Without visitors your website is just a row 0s and 1s in a web server somewhere waiting to be discovered... lost in cyberspace.

To liberate this code and have your website appreciated it needs one essential ingredient... visitors. Easy, eh? Well, not really; we webmasters are competing in the largest, most competitive beauty pageant the world has ever seen, hoping to be chosen as the most attractive digital business out there.

So how do we attract visitors, and just as important, how do we keep them coming back? This answer is easy; we give them what they want, and plenty of it!

You are an Internet user, what do you want? Let me guess... 'digital interaction'? Of course; you want (i) things the way you want them, a 'personalized' service, and (ii) immediacy, interactivity and community. Why? Because you think your opinions, your memories and your actions actually matter. Well, so does everyone else.

To us webmasters, e-commerce entrepreneurs and online service providers nothing is more important than appreciating this fact, because by providing all the toys and digital amenities that flatter the visitor’s ego we also provide the perfect environment for our hidden agenda... getting a potential customer’s attention, email or cold hard cash!

My advice? If you want your website to really be a website, then use every popular digital facility you can to attain and maintain competitive advantage and never, ever fall behind your competitors in providing the very latest, bleeding-edge digital amenities!

RSS, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook etc. These are no longer new, innovative ‘accessories’ to any website: they are now essential elements of the whole Internet ‘experience’. More important, they are what your visitors expect. And you know what happens if people don’t get what they want; they go where they are appreciated… your competitors’ websites. Don’t get lost in cyberspace!