Seven Habits of Highly Successful Websites | Hacker News Reader

Seven Habits of Highly Successful Websites

aaronsw.com

27 pointsdood14 comments

1. Ridiculously overpromise on what you're going to create ("the Macintosh of X")

2. Come out with a marginally interesting clone of something that's already been done to death (wikis, blogs, CMSs, project management, todo lists -- must be highly data driven). Promise to do one feature a day for a month or so and keep it up for about half a week

3. Merge with other sites that are doing better

4. Do jack shit - actually, work on ridiculously overambitious "side projects" on "the weekend". A book is a suitably ridiculous project. Also make sure everyone knows that you read a book a week. The world trembles before your intellectual might.

5. Take your share of the money when the people you're mooching off of get bought

6. Bitch and moan

7. Run like hell

8. (Profit was at step 5.)

9. Blog about all this to make you look like a fucking genius and say that you "finished" things you briefly mentioned doing but never actually started.

Yes I know, he has money and I don't.

I chuckled too, but this doesn't pass the 'say it to his face' test. At least I couldn't say that to someone's face.

Bad design doesn't make sites successful. It's more that sites that for some reason have a strong grip on the user can get away with being lame in other respects. But you can't learn anything from this lameness, because it's random.

I think the post is mostly tongue-in-cheek, he isn't actually suggesting you do these things, just pointing out that there may be more important things to worry about.

No. It's true, it also happens in craiglist, ugly = success, it may be because is less scary without design to the masses?

Woah, woah. Craigslist may be ugly, but it's a UI masterpiece. The ugliness of MySpace comes at the expense of the UI, which makes it infinitely more shitty.

He's looking at a specific kind of website, which I'll call the "big empty room" variety. You know what's popular with people? Big empty rooms. They go in them, talk, eat, smoke cigarettes. Wow. I think I'll start my own big empty room in order to attract people. What do they need?

4 walls. 1 ceiling. 1 floor.

Wow! What could be easier?

Actually, you'll find that revenue-generating websites like eBay, Amazon, adwords.google.com, etc, are pretty heavy with respect to architecture, features, and (I suspect) industry standards.

Not a single word about reddit, although this is a nice observation overall, of course.

Bad graphical design is about minimalism rather than ugliness, I think. Although yes, some logos are hideous, childish, so unprofessional (del.icio.us, reddit, google, etc.)

Liked the web standards part a lot. Somehow it reminds the situation with programming languages - no good software is written in Java - another committee-driven cra... sorry, product.

However, these 7 habits are not sufficient, not even necessary conditions for success. This is just an observation, and I'm almost sure things will change tomorrow in this regard.

I've always thought of the reddit logo as exceptionally hideous, childish, AND unprofessional -- we scored a hat-trick!

No wonder, so is your content - exceptionally h, ch and u, haha! :)

* Reads list

* Calls broker to short News.YC

* Profit!

i see what he did there...

the reason why people go to these site is simply because of the "mr me too" effect. Everyone goes there because everyone else goes there ( except for -i- and a few others who are more likely to be found in place like this one, although every now and then, someone from thoz sites escapes and find themselves here )

In economics, there is a term for that: "positive network externalities", or more simply "network effects".

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