Brett Marsden’s Story
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So, long story short...
Brett Marsden made the mistake of
Not segmenting my users and just following the crowd
My Advice to You is
Determine what your segment will be and focus on what they need with your uniqueness
Here's the whole story
When I was a part of a team developing a new social networking site, we made a mistake of offering identical features as other similar sites; just following the crowd. We created the site for general people, without any boundaries of age or location; unsegmented. We figured, our strength lies in our web design and overall presentation, which is absolutely web2.0-ish, so all people would almost likely to choose us. Based solely on that, I had high hopes that we will get lots of members and traffic. Guess what? It blew up in my face.
The reason people use and stay using the sites that they are using now is because of the features, or at least, the uniqueness of what the site can offer. I had to redo my website to offer unique features to a more segmented and targeted users.
Comments (4)
Yea running a web site is a weird experience for a designer. Because you're always used to the word "done". But a real community is never done and will always evolve over time. I reccomend introducing new features in 3-4 week sprints each week to keep people coming back.
We're in the process of doing the same with this very site.
Agree on that, Dennis. Btw, Only Human has been showcased at our site, http://www.worldtechlogic.com/2007/01/19/only-human-the-place-where-you-can-share-and-learn-about-mistakes/
Hope you like it as much as we enjoy reviewing it :)
It is a cool site as far as i have investigated it.Functional.Clean.User driven content. Thumbs up.
wow.. so you also make social networking sits.. My company also have done few.. hope to have some good inputs from your end .. do let me know in detail what you do ... just curious.. web 2.0 .. thats what we also into...