Right, so recently I’ve been thinking about the structure of websites and what makes a successful website and by successful website I mean traffic monsters who make money, you know the ones I’m talking about.
So here are the categories that I’ve come up with.
- Funny websites
- Free useful services
- Newspapers
- Opinions in the form of blogs
- Practical information, like how-to’s.
- Popular products or services
- Community sites, social networking
Now there are others for sure, but they are the main ones that I could pick out from the many different types of websites, and ultimately if you pick one of those when setting out on your website design quest then you should alright (providing you have the perseverance to succeed).
What does Wuup fall into?
So I guess thats why I started thinking about this topic, because I was thinking about this website, and what it is I’m trying to achieve by having its existence. And I believe it falls into 2 categories, Opinions formed in a blog, and practical services such as how to’s, because we have a lot of how to articles on here, programming, php, java, actionscript etc – and in turn that pulls us in a healthy 15,000 visitors each month, like you reading this article right now…
Aim’s of this site / Taking it forward. Well its got to be more content. After all the main aim of this blog was to give back to the community we have all taken so much from in the form of learning new stuff. So whatever we can give back is the whole aim of this blog, yeah we make a couple of pennies from advertising, but this is in no way the main aim of the website, just a bonus.
Where we’ve gone wrong
With this site, we’ve gone wrong a few times, added irrelevant content, changing the them over and and over, but I think we’re finally there. The content is laid out finally how I want it and its easy to navigate. This site is 4 years old and I can now say that I think we’re there. We’ve tried all sorts which wasn’t right for this site, like the irrelevant content, and I can put this down to the fact that this is because we had no aim, or purpose, or rather we did but didn’t realise it.
Examples of good websites that I mentioned in my categories:
Entertainment (Funny Websites)
Although undoubtedly one of the most popular websites, Youtube, acquired by Google, struggled to make money when Google took it over. I can’t even say for sure if its making money but with all their latest advertising implementations such as un-skippable ads, it would be hard to see that they aren’t making money. Also Google have managed to strike up deals with on demand services such as channel 4′s on demand service and others, which has made it quite a choice for a lot of video consumers.
This site was made popular by viral videos, and still is today. With people passing around the links to their favourite rick roll, or funny video. The funny thing is although these hilarious videos are funny they really don’t have much value to them except huge amounts of traffic. The video owners don’t usually make any money, perhaps the odd t-shirt or mug sale, but its google who is raking it in with advertising.
I wouldn’t bother to compete in the user created video market though, they’ve got the market pretty sown up, and sites such as viddler, oomyala, vimeo are struggling to compete, but are hanging in there in the commercial markets.
Free Useful Service
Twitter of course! Its free, its useful. The microblogging service which saw the love-affair with facebook status updates and created an entire site dedicated to them. Such a simple yet brilliant idea as spawned a user-base of millions. This service has attracted the likes of celebrities, rockstars, bands, marketers and the average joe. It works by simply allowing people to publish 140 character snippets of what they are doing, or what is on their mind, and importantly being able to do this from anywhere by mobile devices.
They’ve recently announced their own ad service which sponsored tweets will be used to make them some dosh. These sponsored tweets are going to show up in search results, and as I’m a huge fan of the twitter search, even using it as much as google now (personally). I can see this working for them. They also have advertising for certain applications, although I haven’t seen this announced anywhere, its clear that I’ve seen the same apps (usually related to current events like the winter olympics just past), over and over in the rotation. There has also been the corporate account whispered which has been brought up over and over and never materialised. Twitter said it would be ready for the end of last year, but it never happened, but they are definitely gearing towards it, with the promise of analytics on their paid accounts.
Newspapers
There are various newspaper or magazine sites about, namely in our genre, technology, it has to be Wired, which has wired magazine. It’s a hugely popular website with tons of contributors who talk about everything tech related. It brings in a huge amount of traffic.
Opinions of blogs
Well you’re on one now 
But if you force my hand for a super successful one it has to be mashable. I tip my hat to you sir.
Practical Information
This one was easy. Although I don’t visit often, they are always coming up in the search results, often number one, due to the sheer weight of the site behind it. Its wikipedia and Wiki How. Although Wikipedia is a non profit website and relies on donations, it certainly doesn’t have to worry about paying the bills, or even getting new content for that matter to add to the masses. Wiki’s are so popular with users its amazing. The second largest wiki in existence is the World of Warcraft’s own wiki enough said.
Popular Products or Services
I’m going to go with someone like Adobe, simply because of the whole battle with Apple and Adobe recently regarding flash, and the dick move by Apple to ruin the launch of the new CS5. I think sure, anyone can do what they want with their own product, including saying that they can’t use cross-script compiling to make apps. But to wait 2 days before the launch of CS5, and know it to be one of the main selling features, it really was a sucky thing to do by Apple.
Adobe have great products, although I do sometimes feel they only make minot updates throughout their CS collection, and charge huge amounts for them. But overall they are the market leaders with no one else coming close, so they get a big thumbs up from me.
Community & Social Networking
Again this wasn’t a difficult choice to make, its got to be facebook, the worlds number one social networking site, which had more traffic than Google recently, and undoubtedly the king of the social networks. They killed myspace off by becoming a cleaner, sleeker alternative. They also run on my favourite programming language PHP, which I like to stick two fingers up to anyone that says PHP isn’t good for scalability, thats why you have to use .NET, which quite obviously being one of the largest social networking sites out there, these people are talking out of their arse for sure.
Conclusions
Although I’ve obviously shown examples of huge traffic monsters, but this is also important to know where to take your website, or create your new website. You can take a slice of these traffic monsters own traffic by building websites for them in the forms of applications, or blogs about them too (like mashable). It’s like the phrase “Build it and they will come” you often hear in the movies, but in our case, we can use “Someone else has built it and I can have some of their traffic”, not as catchy but true
