What does my site offer?

With the thousands of websites that are online, creating and delivering unique and related content is the hardest part of building a website. It is also the most critical. The web today is so extensively used because it is the fastest means of delivering information. Visitors to your site - while temporarily impressed by your Flash and your expert blending of renders - essentially want to be dazzled by your clear, easy to understand content!

So can your site do this? Undeniably, sites like TheDesignWorld and GreyCobra have nice designs, yet their content is what drives the sites. Their content - tutorials and articles which are well-written and painstakingly edited - is what has driven those sites into the limelight.

So be realistic. Go over your site. Is your content easily accessible? Is it unique? While it may seem like a great idea to write simple tutorials, why reinvent the wheel? Be brutally honest with yourself. It's simply padding, isn't it? Take the time to write quality, useful tutorials about lesser known techniques, and your site will flourish.

Is my content any good?

So, your content's well-written. You've got a concise layout, which doesn't suck up your visitors high-bandwidth connection for 10 minutes loading a 5mb Flash intro, and you think you're on your way. Wrong.

Building a site is not simply designing, writing and hoping for the best. Content needs to be fresh! You think sites talking about HTML are still popular? No. XHTML is the way forward. HTML's a deprecated language - the advantages of XHTML are extreme. So write about them!

Even if you spent a week writing out a 5-page balanced argument about why iframes are the best thing since sliced bread, you should face up to your content being out of date. Iframes, these days, aren't used. There are better ways. Faux iframe's using CSS and dynamic languages like PHP and ASP..

The moral of those paragraphs? Your content, however well-written, needs to be up to date. That's integral to your success.

Does my site even need to exist?

In my opinion, this is the question designers very rarely ask themselves. Does my site need to exist?

Well, does it? Again, brutal honesty is necessary here. This should really be considered before you invest in a domain and a host. But does the internet really need another tutorial-indexing site? Does it really need another domain-selling forum? Does it really need another rarely-updated blog?

If the answer to this question is no, then you have a problem. Not an unfixable one though.

Think! Use your brain. You need to come up with something unique. It's exactly like selling a product. Does the world need a different brand of salt and vinegar crisps? No. There's no market. So nobody would bother making them. They can't add anything to the existing market, thus they would lose out to existing competitors.

So get something unique! What does nobody else have? What can you do differently which people will talk about? Or take a small market and expand on it. Look at your competition closely, and beat them. Thrash them to the ground! All their flaws, you must correct. Do that and the market's yours!

In Closing

I don't want to put people off creating websites. Only today, I was shocked by a designer creating a site - well-written, clear, and aesthetically beautiful - better than I could. And he was barely 14! The amount of talent online is amazing. If you've got it, then show the world. Be the best. If you haven't, then don't give up. There are always ways to improve yourself, no matter how good you get.

A lot of designers today are blinded by a desire to showcase their designing talents, without honing them to a market. So ask yourself.. what is going to kill my site?