What is a website?
Posted by antfoodz on March 27, 2008
“History shows that those who are best able to utilize their resources towards their goal are the winners. Those who do not are left as afterthoughts in pages for people who study but do not learn.”
What is a website? Not in the physical or mental sense, but what is it as a function? What is the purpose of putting something out for other people to find and interact with? If you can’t answer this, if you aren’t absolutely clear about what you are doing it, why, and how you are going to reach that end point, then you are failing before you even start.
Like Joseph Campbell views stories, I view the internet. There are thousands of ways to go about it, but in the end, its always the same story.
You have users (X), they do something or many things, to achieve the outcome (Y). Y can be many things, in the commercial sense, it is the dollar figure we put on the outcome of a site interaction. For personal blogs, it is in the mindshare that we are attempting to achieve. It’s not a discussion of success, it is a discussion of outcome. For every X, there is a Y. To achieve a set Y, we have two options, increase X, or find the levers that positively change the formula to get more Y from X. Success is not doing one of those two options, but doing both, and knowing which one you are doing at any given time and being able to balance them. That is managing a website.
We like to think we know what they do, and sometimes we have good insight into it, but we really don’t have a complete picture, nor is it even possible to have one. What we are left with are insights and pictures into a constantly shifting playing field. What is true today will not be true tomorrow. What we think we know, we never do.
There are many ways to try to get insight, but my world resolves around numbers. How do we measure what is there, how does that match against what we think we know is “true”, and what is the best way in which to enact change? It’s a daily battle, but it’s the only one worth fighting.
To be successful, all you have to do is to be able to find the best ways to leverage your available tools and skills and enact positive change towards some end goal. You need to have something you, your team, your site, your company are working towards, and you need to focus everything towards that goal. Not on a yearly basis, not on a weekly, or daily, but minute by minute, hour by hour. The key is not to do it once, but to make every moment about that. Failing is when you lose focus or are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to reach that end goal. Every step of the way, the energy needed to stay on point becomes harder and more difficult, which means that each level requires more sacrifice and more discipline.
In all of this, there is not discussion about your personal skill set, or department, or experience. Those help you fill in the gaps and the roles that are needed to reach that end point. The truth is that the only thing that matters is putting every bit of energy towards that end goal, and to refocus and put more energy, more thought to achieving it.
If you can do that, if you can find a way to gain insight (numbers are not insight!), then skill and talent will be able to go their natural course. If you do not have that insight, that vision, and the ability to focus every moment of every day, all the talent in the world will not let you “win” in the end.
biathlonchamp said
First! LOL