10 years ago i started building website, what started as a hobby and fascination turned into a healthy source of income. I put myself through design school by designing websites and the education i received allowed me to look at websites from a psychological and strategic point of view.

It is not an easy task to sell strategy with a website design pitch. Price wise is much higher and graphically it might not make much difference but of course the results are like night and day. I have a very solid track record that i'm very proud of, i have never worked on a web project that included strategy and failed!

so when i talk about web strategy in construction phase, what do i mean?

3 Strategic Elements every site should have

• Characteristics
  
• Objectives with Benefits
  
• Focus

If you research any of the successful website you will all of the above elements in them. Similarly if you'd like to know if a project is going to fail or not all you have to do is to figure out if the above elements are available or not.

Characteristics

Content and softwares are soulless. They are just a piece of information laid out on an even more soulless canvas. Content by itself is not attractive, but we can give it a zing by giving it a little bit of attention. Content represents the voice of the author, therefore to give content soul we must setup our writing guidelines to have more personal voice embedded into our content.

Some of the blogs that you read constantly and love use the personal voice to give their content soul. When you read these blogs you can imagine the writer writing them, that's very powerful.

The design of the website should also reflect you, the owner of the site. The worst thing a designer can do to his/her client is to make any project a personal and self reflective project. If you are designing a blog for another blogger try to understand who he/she is and try to deign it to reflect them simply because they are going to be the writers of that blog and if the soul of the content doesn't match the design of the site then people wouldn't be able to trust the writer right away. This is probably the biggest reason why i suggest to every client to stay away form already design templates. Worst case scenario, if they like to go with a template try to convince them to at least customize the color to reflect their personality.

Objective with Benefits

People don't buy Concepts, they buy Benefits!

If your site doesn't offer benefits to people then there isn't much reason for them to visit your site. at the same time if your site only offers one benefit that they can take at anytime then people don't have another reason to visit your site again!

Benefits are the very reason people build loyalty to any site. They are also give your site value. So you want to strategize your site to offer benefits as constantly and as frequently as possible. The more benefits you give out the more loyal people will become and the faster you will grow.

for blogs, benefits are as simple as writing "How to" Tutorial articles, for example, how to build a logo with photoshop, or How to save money, or How to fix a car. How To's are just one example, Tip, Tricks, Secrets, Special Offers, and educational articles also serve a lot of benefits people appreciate as well.

Focus

Focus is hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain. Focus is knowing what your site is about and maintaining the same Niche Market focus everyday and every year!

It is hard, i admit, how much can you write about the same topic over and over again and not just worry about running out of ideas but also worry about boring the hell out of the audience.  To avoid boring people keep revisiting the soul of your content, also revisit my Branding Article. When Choosing a Niche Topic you're actually choosing a Niche Target Market. Target market has to be big enough to make business sense but not too big and broad that it wouldn't stick. Also it is a great idea to have multiple Niche blogs to avoid boredom for yourself as well.

so before you start yet another blog, rethink why you want to start it, if it is going to be a hobby are you willing to keep it a hobby but if not

While success comes at a steep price for only a few websites, failure however needs no effort at all. It is easy to fail.and you never feel bad for failing if you’ve never put any efforts to begin with but what if you did and put in extra efforts and still failed. Failing is discouraging, frustrating and most often causes depression but in every failed attempt we have an opportunity to move a step closer to success.

If there is a Will, There is a Way!

Since this is not a philosophy or psychology blog i won’t get into how we fail as human beings and rather focus why we fail as website owners. It’s much more attractive and relevant.

There is a saying that 2 wrongs don’t make it right but when it comes to failure and success, 2 failed attempts could lead to success. Therefore i’m not saying avoid failing at all costs but rather look at your failures from a more positive point of view. Figure out how you failed and try fix it; figure out what failed you so can avoid it next time, keep the attempts going until nothing else fails you and boooom No Failures = Success

so what are the common thing that cause a website to fail?

5 Major Reasons for Failure

1. Lack of Strategy
2. Dependent on Buzz/PR
3. Forgetting People/Users
4. Wrong Ego
5. Fear of Risks

Lack of Strategy

You don’t know why your website should exist. More importantly you’re not exaclty sure who should be using your site and last but not least, your site doesn’t address the needs or serve benefits.

Having a strategy is like having an open eye vision, you know where you are and where you want to go and what strategy does is to layout the path that would get you to your goals. You can’t wake up one day and see a million people on your site but instead you have to wake up everyday and fight for people to visit your site one person at a time. It’s a Process!
 

Dependent of Buzz/PR

You’re too desperate to be mentioned by TechCrunch, Mashable, Wierd, Times, etc... if this is the only that you think you can become successful you might as just NOT do anything, relax and forget about the web business. But if it’s your goal to be mentioned by the above sites or companies in a year then that’s a legitimate proposition, simple go back a step and work on strategy and i can gaurantee you that you will achieve your goals but let me warn you everyday tons of websites, projects, softwares, ideas get mentioned on these sites how many of them do you became successful afterwards? not that many!
 

Forgetting People

You’re site need traffic, that’s the primary measure of sucess and source of income. The sucess of your site depends on the people that visit your site so WHY DO YOU IGNOR THEM?

In my experience take care of people and everything else will take care of itself. make sure you have a easy to use site layout, easy to read, easy to get around and discover new thing but most importantly easy to understand the true benefits of the site. When you serve people benefits they all of a sudden value what you’re doing and that is GOLD!
 

Wrong Ego

Want to be like Scoble to become successful like Scoble? Wrong Ego kills in any business. It’s ok express your opinions and wanting to stand for something but if your ego is blinding you from seeing the truth it will aggrevgate your audiece and you will lose them. Not to mention that it’s extremely hard to gain trust and respect if you have the Wrong Ego!
 

Fear of Risks

No Risk, No Reward! should i say more?
 

Be prepared for risks in this business. Being prepared allows you turn dumb risks into calculated ones. You have to be on top your game and make decision on the fly. On the internet time is something you don’t have and just like the real world time is something you will never get again.

So go do it, and do it with a bang and don’t forget to keep the above 5 things in mind.