Be more like Amazon
Amazon.com is one of the most successful Web sites ever. Did you ever pause and ask yourself why? Many of the techniques that allowed Amazon to rise to the top and stay there are techniques that news Web sites and others could adopt — and adapt to fit their own businesses.
At Read/Write Web, Alex Iskold explores Amazon’s “continuous innovation of their core e-commerce business”:
… when people talk about tagging we think del.icio.us and Flickr, not Amazon. Well, Amazon rolled out a tagging strategy last year and it is now working very well. Each Amazon product can now be tagged by users and a set of tags is then shown on the product pages.
Allowing users to tag stories might help news Web sites in their pathetic search engine showings.
Iskold also notes that Amazon’s site is “getting more Ajaxy,” which translates simply into not having pages reload every time you click something.
Wow! That will really fry the brains of all those crazy news executives who have forced their Web designers and programmers to artificially inflate their page-view numbers by INCREASING the number of times the page reloads, or goes to a new page, when people click!
One of the best things news Web sites could do to make people happier to be there is to remove all the impediments that stand between site visitors and the content they want.
Every time I come across one of those horrible photo slideshows that reloads the entire page for each photo, what do I do? I LEAVE THE SITE. I might last for three photos, but I just can’t bear it. It’s clunky, it’s wrong, it’s insulting to my intelligence — and above all, it’s just plain hostile.
Iskold doesn’t like everything that Amazon is doing — he’s not wild about the new wikis, and while he likes Amazon’s “plogs,” I do not. I don’t care to have any more marketing intrude into my life than I already have, and to me, the plogs are just that — sales pitches from authors and publishers. (My publisher wanted me to write one for Flash Journalism, and I said, “Why? I already have a real blog.”)
Adding features that make users happy won’t always get you points on Wall Street, however. Iskold admits that Amazon’s stock price has been “stagnating for the larger part of five years.” (Hmmm … maybe that’s just another sign that what’s good for Wall Street is not necessarily good for the general public.)
Technorati tags: business | online media | audiences
What, no screen shot of roanoke.com’s “Share this story” function (viewable on every story page on our site)? We only beat washingtonpost.com and nytimes.com by a few months.
January 25, 2007 at 7:26 pmI did Roanoke a big disservice, I know! Sorry about that … but then, everyone EXPECTS you guys to be innovative!
January 25, 2007 at 10:09 pm