A good website is measured by how much traffic it attracts. To measure the effectiveness of a website, traffic is the only and best criterion. What kind of practices bring high traffic? For this, we can simply take a look at the top 10 websites ranked by traffic ( http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500 ). From these and other popular websites, we have the following conclusions:
1. A heavy-traffic site is not necessarily a “good looking” site. Some sites can have very plain design. For example, facebook has a very plain page, but its traffic is ranked 7th in the world, with 58 million active users.
Some sites look crowded and ugly, but still attract a lot of visitors. For example, democratic underground has a very unflattering home page, but its traffic is ranked 1,759 in the US and 12,525 in the world. (Websites within top 10,000 range is considered high-traffic site.)
2. The key to high-traffic sites is functionality rather than “beautiful face”. The more information a user can get from a site and the more useful the site is, the more traffic it will receives. For example, Huffingtonpost.com has traffic rank 395 in the US, and 2,757 in the world. This is because its fresh political blogs written by high-profile bloggers (more than a dozen for its political columns). However, the design for this website is poor and much space is not efficiently used. Another site Wikipedia has extremely simple design, but you can find deep and useful content by search. Wikipedia has the traffic rank 9 in the world.
3. Two important ingredients that attract eyeballs: news and video. A website that reports news will surely attract people to visit it again and again. Thus digg.com, a site that collects user-reported news, is ranked 29 in the US and 139 in the world. Blogging sites like Huffingtonpost.com also adds news to its content. Video sites like youtube is ranked 3 in the world, next only to Yahoo and Google. Video sites in other languages are also widely popular: The Chinese video sites toodou.com and 56.com is ranked 120 and 159 respectively. This is probably the reason that many websites now have video features. Between the two features, video typically outperforms news (which is mostly text) in attracting user visit.
4. Fresh content is essential for high traffic. Be it news, video, or user posting, a site has to update its content constantly. This means updating daily, hourly or even every minute. Digg.com has it content updated almost every second. The nature of human attention demand freshness. A user will quickly be turned off by a site that stays stale.
5. User participation is key for the rapid growth of traffic. Giving the limited time and resources of the web creators, the content has to come from the user. (The only exception is search companies like Google or Yahoo, which has thousands of machines that grab contents from the Internet automatically.) The form of user participation can be many: uploading video (youtube), posting comments (huffingtonpost), posting in forum (democraticunderground), creating personal profile (facebook), posting news link (digg.com), posting ratings and reviews (imdb.com), and so on.
In summary, a good website is one that provides useful content to the user, is very fresh and has high user participation. Utilizing multimedia such as video also helps to boost the traffic. If we follow these principles, we will see an excellent website.
