Darryl Patterson

It amazes me that I still have to ask people this question. Back in the mid-90s, it made sense that clients didn’t quite know why they wanted a website, they just knew they had to have one. The world wide web is 16 years old! But even still, people focus on the technology, the bells and whistles, and not the real reasons why they want a website.

A successful website will always be a balance between the needs of the business and the needs of the user. If you focus solely on the business needs, you usually end up with a site that’s irrelevant to the user – if you focus solely on the user, your business ends up going bankrupt. This was the cause of the dot-com crash – you either had great ideas that couldn’t make money, or you made money off ideas that had no longevity or didn’t really solve a user’s problem.

As the wise Bigweld said in the animated movie Robots: “Find a hole, fill a hole.”

There is still endless opportunity out there. Find what people need, what people want, what’s missing – this will give you the “why” for the user (your customers). Then figure out how to make money filling this hole (the business model) – this will give you the “why” for people like investors.

Seems obvious, but I still seem to be getting comments like: “I want social networking!” or “We need to tap into the blogosphere!” and in the meantime, I guess I’ll have to keep asking the question: “Why?”