How to fail online — examples of websites that have failed and why
Standing on the Shoulders of Giant’s: How to learn from failed websites.
A myriad of reasons why a website would fail, ranging from plain poor design to bad digital marketing to not keeping up with what consumers want. It is easy to create a website that fails but to create a successful website. We need to look at what has worked and what has not worked for other websites. Looking through the graveyard of the World Wide Web, you can learn a lot about why a website drifted into obscurity. Some were replaced by a similar service with better features, while others failed because of management. in this blog, we’ll go through the details of how and why these companies failed and how you can avoid those same mistakes.
Guilty of Poor Design.
The 90s were chock-full of poorly designed websites. It makes sense, the internet was starting to come into mainstream use, and many computer hobbyists were trying their hand at making websites. That said, one website that should have been better was the CNN webpage for O.J. Simpson’s trial, which is miraculously still up and viewable. Right away, we see a cheesy 90’s clip art and a long unformatted list of related stories.
Without anything to guide our eye to it, the link to the full story (arguably where you want the most people spending time), but instead, our vision goes right to the cheesy clip art. It is pretty easy to see why no one brings up the CNN web page when discussing the impact O.J.’s trial had on how we consume media.
What Happened to Jeeves?
Next up, why don’t we look at an example that saw some success? Nowadays, just about everyone uses google, so much so that the term google is just a catchall for searching for something online. Younger internet users might not remember when Google wasn’t the dominant search engine, but it wasn’t always the case. One of the first popular search engines was called AskJeeves.com.
What separates AskJeeves from other search engines was the idea of having a “virtual concierge” named Jeeves in the uniform of a butler. Jeeves would give you specific “knowledge capsules,” as the designers called them, in response to common questions like “how to clean a stained shirt?” or “how to get rid of skunk smell?”. While the idea of only getting a specific answer seems limited to us now, many users in the past loved the idea. By 1999 AskJeeves was getting more than 1 million searches a day and, after going public, saw their stock prices shoot through the roof up to nearly 200 dollars a share.
Unfortunately, AskJeeves’ success didn’t last long, and the dot-com crash of the early 2000s sent AskJeeves tumbling with a reported loss of 425 million dollars in 2001. After this horrendous turn of events, AskJeeves decided to forsake their mascot and pivot to a more general search-oriented website instead of focusing on specific questions.
By then, they were already behind the curve. By the time AskJeeves.com made its first-ever profit (2003), they had already lost a large percent of the market. In 2003 AskJeeves took up only 3 percent of the industry while google had now owned nearly 33%. A couple of years later, in 2005, Askjeeves.com was bought out for almost 2 billion, and soon AskJeeves morphed into ask.com.
While ask.com is still up and running but I would be hard-pressed to call it a success.
The Problem with MySpace.
A more recent and still somewhat culturally relevant example is MySpace. MySpace originally started as a spin-off of Friendster (a social media platform from the early 2000s) but quickly took over the market.
In 2004 MySpace launched and had some success, with their site gaining over a million users in their first month. One of the website's most significant benefits was the ability to customize your profile to a degree we don’t see in modern social media. Users could add music to their page and change the layout and design. It might be easy to blame Facebook, but unlike AskJeeves, MySpace had more problems than just failing to adapt to market conditions.
MySpace began with a software called ColdFusion. While ColdFusion’s simplicity helped them release MySpace quickly, it was challenging when it came to scalability.
The co-founder of MySpace, Chris DeWolfe, even went so far as to call it “a Mickey Mouse sort of technology.” By 2005 MySpace’s needs had outgrown ColdFusion, and it was too late to change to open-source technology. Instead, they switched to Microsoft .Net, which was inflexible and disliked by web developers.
One of the biggest reasons for MySpace’s downfall was the need to monetize the site quickly. Many of the ads were of a less than savory nature. As a result, news stories started to come out about children exposed to inappropriate images on myspace. Later attorney generals from around the country began looking into MySpace. Subsequently, MySpace quickly included safety and privacy features, causing the development cycle to turn into crisis management and not innovation.
Coupled with the fact that MySpace tried to create dozens of features themselves instead of letting third-party developers take a shot at it (like Facebook and Twitter), they did not have enough human resources to stay afloat.
By June of 2008, between the controversy and the development problems, MySpace’s decline had started, and with Facebook drastically overtaking and leading the trend, MySpace was in the doomsday territory.
Common Pitfalls.
Before we move on to examples of successful business websites with some longevity, we should look at some of the common pitfalls when designing a website.
First, why don’t we look back at the O.J. website? At first glance, we see some low-res clip art with links to parts of the story. During 1996 this was par for the course, but nowadays, most websites avoid using clipart that comes across as cheap and outdated.
Most modern websites will have a navigation bar with a more minimal design to navigate the website. One other failure of the O.J. website was that the link to their webpage containing the main news story was just a tiny hyperlink at the top of the page.
While the O.J. website lacked flair, that was not the case for many websites from the period. If anything, the design aesthetic of many 90s web pages was crowded, cluttered, and headache-inducing.
Between this webpage and the CNN page, we can see that web design has grown a lot in the last 25 years, and while it seems more accessible than ever to make a website, we need to learn from previous mistakes.
Google's Mistake to Success
Google’s sparse, minimalist design can be traced back to when the founders were unfamiliar with HTML and just wanted a quick interface. While most websites, lack of arrangement could hinder it, it was a perfect fit for Google. If anything, Google’s barebones aesthetic contributed to its long-term success. Unlike AskJeeves or Yahoo, there wasn’t anything that could age poorly or that was superfluous.
Another way their minimalist design benefitted them was in the inclusion of ads. Three years into its existence, Google took its first step into the world of monetization with the introduction of Google AdWords. Google ads are something you don’t even think much about. Unlike Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, Google ads are hardly intrusive.
Takeaway
What makes a website successful isn’t universal. It depends on who you are targeting and what is needed. If you are making a homepage for a business, you will not style it the same as a social networking site.
You need to think about the end goal and give your website a solid foundation. While there isn’t any surefire way to make a successful website, one of the best places to start is by a simple website and to the point.
