In the series of 10 tips for … I offer you the ten key points to make your website work today and multiply your traffic by 10.
- A short domain name, in .com or .us if the full name allows you to play on words.
- A design using heavily rounded corners and fruity colors (blue, lime green, orange, yellow, pink).
- Compulsory, limited registration, and if possible by invitation to participate in the life of the site.
- A community of users, unifying, as useless as it is.
- AJAX, even in the most unlikely places and an RSS feed, if possible several.
- Let users generate the majority of the site’s content (useful for neurons).
- Use tags and other microformats (hcard, geo …).
- Leave the site in beta version, even if it is no longer likely to evolve; users feel valued by belonging to a group of happy fews , and this makes it possible to forgive any undocumented functionalities .
- Every six, three or six months, hint at the possibility of a takeover by a large group, the merger with another site, or the arrival of an investor, without ever really admitting it.
- Communicate on the progress of the project and related topics on an associated blog.
After six months to a year at this rate, you should be bought out by Google or Yahoo. This post obviously includes a good dose of second degree. But not that much.