Webmaster Fort – hosting, seo, affiliates, desingers, domain news

1. Speed
First and foremost, I believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it. I see this more with mainstream users than I do with power users. I think that power users sometimes have a bit of a sympathetic eye to the challenges of building really fast web apps, and maybe they are willing to live with it, but when I look at my wife and kids, they are my mainstream view of the world. If something is slow, they are just gone or telling me they need a new computer.

2. Less is More
Less is more, unless you are talking about Generation X’ers reliving the glory days at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. For web development, I really believe this, particularly early on when you launch something. Over time, you can grow the utility of your service. Facebook today probably offers 20 or 30 different features of significance in their service, but when they launched, it was really quite simplistic. I think that is true of most great services.

3. Instant Utility
What this means is the service is instantly useful to you. If you build a service and the user has to spend an hour configuring the service, setting it up, importing contacts, doing a lot of data entry, I don’t think most people are going to put up with that. The service has to be useful right out of the box.

I see a lot of websites and applications make this mistake. There are a lot of tricks you can use to create instant utility and then go from there. A good example of this is if you are building an information service, you can crawl the web to populate the service initially, even though long term you expect to get the data some other way. It is critical to  give people something right off the bat that is useable.

Another example of this is when Google launched Google Video maybe 4 or 5 years ago, around the same time that YouTube launched; if you uploaded a video to Google Video, after you uploaded it you would get a note that said, “Come back in about a week and your video will be shown.” Of course, that didn’t work very well. YouTube provided instant encoding and you could see the video literally seconds after you uploaded it. That is what I am talking about when I use the term “instant utility”.

4. Make it Personal
Personal means many things to many people, but essentially, it is a lot like instant utility. You want third-party developers to infuse your application with their energy. You also want to make your application infused with your user base’s energy. The more of their data and their personality and energy that they can contribute to your application, the more ownership that they feel of it, and the more likely they are to advocate it and become, in effect, your marketing force. It is very important to make your application personal for everybody. That could mean allowing people to change graphics, backgrounds or even design their own avatar.

5. Software is Media

This is one topic that I continually discuss with potential clients. My view is that software is media today. Particularly consumer software, when people use it, they approach your software in the same way they would approach media. Women do not buy People magazine because it has boring stories, nor do men buy Men’s Health to become a fitter man. Your website needs to have an attitude and a style. Separate yourself and attract your potential customers to you.

6. Make it Programmable
Talking to a group of web app developers, I think this probably goes without saying, but I think it is important to make your application programmable, and make it possible so that others can build on top of or connect to or add value to, in some way, your web application. That means API’s, and in my opinion read/write API’s. The founder of Delicious told me a couple of years ago that if it is not read/write then it is not an API. That has sort of become religion inside our firm. We really think if it is a read-only API, it might as well be RSS. The most important thing about programmability is that when people can add value to your application, they are in effect adding life to your application.

7. RESTful
I don’t know that I’m necessarily using this term correctly. I think most of you know what the term REST means. It means something very specific from a software architecture point of view, but my reason for putting this up here is slightly different. It is a bit of a misuse of the term, but I am going to try to make sense of this anyway.

In a REST architecture, your resources have a URL and they can be called at that URL. That’s kind of the software architecture that is outlined in the REST approach. What I mean is that the entire application, everything in the application has a URL, and ideally, a very clean and comprehensible URL.

If you look at something like a Twitter list, you will see a URL that says something like “twitter.com/ingenux/list…” and that will be all of the lists that I am on. There is really nothing that you can click on or look at in the Twitter application that does not have its own unique URL. You can take that URL, send it via email, or put it out into the social media world. The entire Twitter application is built so that the URLs are well understood by everybody who might use them.

8. Clean
Clean, to me, means that the application cannot be busy on the page. Your experience should be of the application, without unnecessary distractions. This can be achieved with white space or dark space; it doesn’t really matter whether it’s white or dark, but lots of space. It’s important to really put the focus on the page’s functionality. You can do this with big fonts, without too much functionality presented on any one page. Make the design very clean, simple, and inviting, and make it so the people know, right away, what they need to do.