Nine Inch Nails - FAIL BSOD

NIN - BSOD FAIL

10 Epic Web Failures

David Towers over at GoodWebPractices.com has a great top ten of the 10 most epic web venture failures. Great article:

These outstanding web failures did not require a $700 billion government bail out but they did manage to burn a hole in someone's pocket!

1. Myspace
The idea: Social networking site aimed at 13 year olds.

Spent: Rupert Murdoch paid $327 million for MySpace in July 2005 (more info).

Highlights: More than 100 million users. Users can add friends, customise their profiles, add comments to profile pages and embed music. Myspace was Voted #1 worst website by PCWorld.

What went wrong? Myspace let users personalise their pages making the majority of profiles look horrific and illegible.

2. HavenWorks.com
The idea: News portal

Spent: $120 per year for past 9 years (Hosting cost!)

Highlights: Homepage is over 800k! Over 3600 diggs for HavenWorks being the worst designed website on the net. Received over 70,000 visitors in March (according to Compete).

What went wrong? What didn't? How this site has been online over 9 years defeats imagination. HavenWorks looks more like a pack of sweets than a news website.

3. Pets.com
The idea: Sell pet accessories and supplies direct to consumers.

Spent: $82.5 million in 2 years.

Highlights: Most trafficked online pet store at the time. Created a famous sock puppet which appeared on TV ads (watch a medley of Pets.com TV ads here). Ran a Super Bowl ad which cost $1.2 million.

What went wrong? Unsustainable business model. Who wants to wait 2 days for your cat litter to arrive when your cat has already pooped all over the kitchen floor.

4. Webvan
The idea: Online grocer, sold and delivered groceries within the US.

Spent: $1billion in 18 months.

Highlights: Went from a $1.2bn company with 4,500 employees to bust in less than two years. Share price went from $30 to 6 cents in a few months.

What went wrong? They built an infrastructure that cost over a billion dollars before they had made serious profit. The directors didn't understand the importance of cash flow!

5. Kozmo.com
The idea: Free one-hour delivery of any items above $10 (like DVD rentals or Starbucks coffee) within their service area.

Spent: Over $280 million in 3 years.

Highlights: Amazon invested $60m in Kozmo. Expanded to 7 US cities. Over 1100 employees. Advertised on TV. Documentary film made which portrays the fate of the company (e-Dreams, 2001).

What went wrong? How did they expect to cover the huge start up costs delivering DVD rentals and a pack of gum for free?

6. Flooz.com
The idea: Create an online currency. Can you lend me a Flooz?

Spent: $50 million in 3 years.

Highlights: Promoted by comic actress Whoopi Goldberg. Flooz lasted two and a half years. Russian mafia used Flooz for money laundering!

What went wrong? Who wants to use pay for products using an online currency when they could just use a credit card! What were they thinking?

7. eToys.com
The idea: Sell toys online.

Spent: $166 million in 4 years.

Highlights: Stock went from a high of $84 per share in October 1999 to a low of just 9 cents per share in February 2001.

What went wrong? Classic boom-to-bust, spending outweighed the company's income.

8. Kibu.com
The idea: Online community for teenage girls: "fashion, music, and boys"

Spent: $22 million in less than a year.

Highlights: Backed by a number of big Silicon Valley names including Jim Clark. Ran out of money and closed the site 46 days after the launch party!

What went wrong? A spectacular failure. Boom to bust to under a year. Some say Kibu.com was a victim of the fall in the financial markets as a result of the dot com bust.

9. Boo.com
The idea: Sell expensive branded fashion apparel.

Spent: $135 million in 6 months.

Highlights: When Boo.com went bust, they owed over $21million to creditors. Boo.com's software and technology purchased at $70 million, were sold off for $250k.

What went wrong? They built a site using JavaScript and Flash in the days of 56k modems so users had to wait ages to load the site, they also employed 400 people when they only needed 30.

10. Microsoft live search
The idea: Create a search service that people will actually use.

Spent: Several billion dollars!

Highlights: Multiple attempts to buy out Yahoo. Launched two programs to entice users to use Live: Cashback and SearchPerks. Cashback was launched in May 2008 and didn't have a significant effect on traffic numbers. SearchPerks was launched on the 1st October and probably won't do much either.

What went wrong? Live's search results are so poor, users can't even be bribed to use it! Live search has less than 10% of the search market.

Full article

5 Tips To Great Web Design

If you're building your very own website it will really serve you in the long run to pay special attention to website design from the outset. Sure you can go back and fix things at a later date, but a lot of damage can already have been done to your online credibility by that point - and that credibility may take a very long time to build back up again, so why take the risk?

Here are five do's and don'ts to ensure that any Website you design lives up to a basic level of good usability from a visitor's perspective.

1) Splash pages are not a good idea

What's a splash page? It's the first page you see when you arrive at a Website. The specific ones that are bad are those that say something like 'Welcome!' and then have you waiting for several minutes while some audio or video presentation loads - not a good idea. Remember, your Website visitors will typically have a very short attention span.

Your site is competing with millions of others and making your visitors wait around will only make them want to hit the back button in their browser and go visit somewhere else. The first page, the 'Home' page, of your Website should be a genuine content page with a fast load time, i.e. not excessive in the graphic department, where all of the other pages and sections of your site are easily accessible from.

2) Don't overdo it with the banner adverts

Excessive use of banner adverts will tend to give your Web pages a slow load time and, particularly if they flash and pulse in a kaleidoscope of color, will irritate and annoy your visitors rather more than they'll entertain them. But they'll make you money, I hear you say? Will they? Most experienced Webmasters will tell you that the days of successful banner advertising are pretty much in the past.

Most Web surfers these days have learned that banners are advertising and obvious advertising tends to get tuned out. You can get away with one or two banners per page that look in context with the general look and feel of your Web pages but overdoing it will only make you look like an amateur. Banner farms are so old hat and don't impress anyone these days, if they ever did.

3) Make your site's navigation menu simple and easy to understand

How many Websites have you found that left you completely bewildered when it came to finding your way around and locating the information that they appeared to promise and that you were looking for? Probably more than you care to remember, sadly. And how many of them did you choose to revisit after having been bamboozled first time around? Not many, right? Well, learn from your own experience here and make sure that you put a lot of time and effort into planning your site's navigation menu so that it is logical and easy to understand. It's a good idea to test it on a few friends to see if they can find what they're looking for without any help from you. If they can't, it's back to the drawing board.

4) Choose your Website color schemes wisely

If you give your visitors a headache when they're at your site they'll a) leave quickly and b) not come back. One of the best ways to achieve those two undesirable effects is to choose some sort of garish color scheme that even your Website's Mother would not be able to love. Pay particular attention in this regard to text. Make sure that your text is of a size that makes it comfortably readable and that it stands out clearly from its background. This is best ensured by sticking with normal black text on a white background.

5) Get rid of that annoying muzak

You don't have cheesy 'tunes' playing in the background on your Website do you? If you do, please get rid of them. It really won't do you any favors, you'll just come across as a complete amateur who really doesn't care about annoying their visitors, and if you want a successful Website, that's not something you should be going out of your way to do. That's not to say that audio and, indeed, video don't have a place on a successful Website.

With the ever-increasing use of broadband Internet connections it is perfectly possible to integrate informative and entertaining audio and video presentations into Web pages that might even be more acceptable to your target audience than plain old text on its own. Just make sure that the audio and video you provide can be turned on and off by your Website visitor and has easily-adjustable volume.

It's really very tempting to just jump right in and start building your Website without much planning but it really is more sensible to spend a reasonable amount of time working things out on paper first. Doing this will almost certainly save you time in the long run by minimizing the number of mistakes you'll have to correct that jumping in with both feet without thinking will inevitable lead to.

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