What makes a website successful?

24ways, the advent calendar for web geeks, is back again. Entry #4 is from Paul Boag, and he’s suggesting that a website’s success really isn’t, after all, determined by valid code, accessibility, usability, or attractive design – but by whether its content supports the owners’ business objectives, is targeted at the right audience, and provides appropriate calls to action.

Paul cites eBay and Amazon as examples: they achieved huge success by uniting the right content with the right audience, regardless of design, poor code quality and major (and minor) usability issues.

True, as far as it goes. But I think there’s more to it than that – and that web developers’ other skills shouldn’t be rejected as useless.

Why? Because there are actually 3 facets to a successful website:

eBay and Amazon are exceptions, but they’re exceptions that prove the rule. What they got absolutely right was matching great content to the needs of their audience.

They were able to ‘short-circuit’ findability by making sure everyone knew about them. Search engine performance really didn’t mean much when everyone searched for ‘ebay’ and ‘amazon’ not ‘online auctions’ and ‘online bookshop’. (Most people, of course, won’t have this advantage, so skills like writing valid code, accessibility and SEO come back into play.)

Likewise, being the ‘first and only’ (at least that everyone knew about) helped deal with minor, or even major, usability issues. They were ‘usable enough’ in the beginning, when competitors were unknown and the general trend on the web was of task failure. (Jakob Nielsen estimates nearly 60% of the time.) As they’ve lost that advantage over time, usability (and its relations like UX, IA and so on) have renewed importance. For everyone else, they’ve always been there.

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