Ever Wondered What Challenges Other People With Their Web Site ?



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Have you ever wondered what challenges are faced by other webmasters and owners in the design and promotion of their websites, well I certainly have and so I decided to try and find out.

I created a short survey which asked the following questions:

1. How long have you been running a website ?

2. What challenges do you face right now with the DESIGN of your website ?

3. What challenges do you face right now with the PROMOTION of your website ?

4. What challenges do you think you'll face with your web business over the next 12 months ?

5. What is your Number ONE single biggest problem in running your web business ?

6. What is your 2ND single biggest problem in running your web business ?

7. How experienced do you consider yourself with all the areas of WEB DESIGN ?

8. How experienced do you consider yourself with the PROMOTION of a web site ?

For most questions respondents were asked to choose their answers from a list and could select as many answers as they thought applied to them.

In answer to Q1. How long have they been running a website ?

27% answered less than 6 months.

18% said 6 to 12 months.

18% said 1 to 2 years.

37% had more than 2 years experience.

To answer Q2. What challenges do they face right now with the DESIGN of their website, respondents were given 36 possible answers to choose from.

The top 10 challenges respondents gave in DESIGN were, in order:

1. Optimizing Web PAGES for Search Engines

2. Optimizing Web SITE for Search Engines

3. Choosing/adding a Link Directory

4. Adding a content management system

5. Tracking pages visitors view on their site

6. Finding content for the web site

7. Creating Images for web pages

8. Choosing the right web hosting

9. Choosing/adding an Autoresponder

10. Adding and using RSS News Feeds

To answer Q3. What challenges do they face right now with the PROMOTION of their website, respondents were given 24 possible answers to choose from.

The top 10 challenges respondents gave in PROMOTION were, in order:

1. Getting more visitors from search engines

2. Writing content to attract search engines

3. Finding other sources to get more visitors

4. Gain/maintain more links to their web site

5. Get better Google Adwords results

6. How pages rank with search engines

7. Testing web pages for best changes to make

8. Creating better headlines for web pages

9. Getting better Adsense results

10. How/Which Search Engines to submit to

In regard to challenges over the next 12 months and the number one and two single biggest problems in running a web business, the common theme was getting enough traffic, cheaply and finding the time to do everything.

On how experienced respondents considered themselves with all areas of WEB DESIGN the majority felt competent but would like to learn more.

When asked how experienced they considered themselves with the PROMOTION of a web site the majority knew nothing or just how to do the basics.

Conclusion

It was clear from these early results that issues with search engine ranking and getting more traffic by what ever means were among the greatest challenges for website owners in 2005. Other specific problems were in creating content, managing and getting links and finding the time to do it all. The majority of respondents felt they knew little or just the basics about website promotion.


It remains to be seen whether these results change as more people complete the survey, since it's still ongoing. Not enough responses have been collected to make these results statistically sound, so if you would like to contribute to these finding then you can take the short survey at the link below.

I will publish an update to these findings on my site. As a thank you for completing the survey I have some good advice on the site to help with the 3rd highest issue with web design that of choosing an adding a link directory. I am also giving away some free automated link directory management software.



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This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al.

APIs and data portability

The blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail.

Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:

  1. To speed up the load time of their website
  2. To have a back up plan if the API call fails

A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail.

Caching is good contingency design practice

As I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible.

A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above.

And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Right, and it looks like I had not built the commenting functionality into this version of the site. What a surprise. I'd still like feedback so if anyone has any email me at mike at this domain and I'll pop a comment right into the database. Off to build some commenting functionality... Comments should be working now.



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