PRIDE - just expecting your site to work

Remember the film The Field of Dreams ? In it, Kevin Costner was told that if he turned a field into a baseball pitch dead players would turn up to play on it. He was told: “Build it and they will come.”

In the online world, baby, they don’t. They really really don’t. You have to go and get them with the content you have to market, no matter how much good work you’ve done.

The Information architecture may have been well designed; the creatives and navigation structure may have been user tested and the stakeholders may have all signed it off. No doubt, the content management system is industry standard and you bet it’s flexible enough to cater for future developments. It goes without saying the site is 3A, XHTML and W3C compliant to boot. Your analytics package will be in place ready to measure the large number of customers who will come to admire your work. You are all so very very proud as your new site launches. Look upon our works, ye mighty, and despair. You have built it and they will come.

But they don’t and after a short peak of modest initial interest the traffic begins to die off. It dies because you haven’t attracted anyone to your site with interesting stuff .

The reality is you live and die by your content . No matter what your business, when you are online you are in the content publishing business. The content your beieve in and want to market is the only long term determinant of the success of your site.