Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

It was all over the news last week - ex-Googlers launched a “Google-killer” search engine that was going to blow away the competition. Morning news shows picked up the story and curious netizens (myself included) flocked to the site causing it to overload in the surge. Co-workers at companies around the country stated “we need to optimize for Cuil” (seriously). So what’s the deal?

From a marketing and online traffic perspective Cuil is mostly a disaster (see the visitor estimate chart from Alexa above). Cuil did a great job generated buzz and PR but clearly people came, they saw, and they never returned. Surely the folks at Cuil expected the launch to kick start their site’s growth but when your product isn’t quite ready for prime time this strategy can backfire.

So what did Cuil do wrong? Here’s are my thoughts:

• Over-promised and under-delivered. The promise was the Cuil answered search queries better, faster, and more thoroughly than existing search engines. Based on my (and others’) tests it failed on all three fronts. Some searches returned zero results where other search engines return thousands; other queries returned strange and irrelevant listings at the top for simple keywords. On top of it all, Cuil was painfully SLOOOOW on launch day.
• Unprepared for launch. Clearly Cuil wasn’t prepared for the curious users who flocked to the site on the first day and this meant the site was slow or unable to load entirely. Bad first impression for customers who may never return.
• Terrible name. Come on - if you can’t afford “cool.com” then pick another name. I won’t remember how to spell your brand, I’m not sure how to say it, and I don’t understand what it even means. Seriously horrible branding.
• Unconventional layout. Yep, there’s a reason search engine listings aren’t laid out “magazine-style.” When folks are searching they’re usually in a hurry to get somewhere else and they’re not interested in curling up on the couch and perusing the listings before going to an actual website. Give users the relevant information with a minimal amount of scrolling and eye movement and they’ll appreciate your service (and perhaps return). The thumbnail photos are terrible as well and most don’t always come from the website that’s being listed. The WORST search engine user experience I’ve seen yet.

Those are the big problems, each one pretty much a company-killer in its own right. Of course time will tell if I’m right to pronounce Cuil dead on arrival - anyone want to take bets on how long it takes?

If you’re a webmaster who makes a living (or a part time living) through your website, imagine this for a moment: what if Google disappeared? How would it affect your business? As an MBA student at Duke we learned in business strategy classes that over-reliance on a single supplier or partner can be a risky proposition but on the internet in 2008, do we have much of a choice?

Don’t get me wrong, Google is great and I firmly believe the company tries to make good on its promise to “do no evil.” But consider this: What if Google stopped the AdSense program due to ongoing problems with click fraud - how would you monetize your website? Or what if Google started charging the market rate for Google Analytics - say $100 a month? Could you afford to keep using the service?

Even more frightening, consider the power the Google search engine has to direct traffic and customers to your website. We had a bit of a scare with one of our sites just last month when our traffic dropped from around 6,000 visits per day to just over 1,000. Sure enough many of our important keywords had dropped from page 1 to page 7 or worse. If things had stayed that way our business would have been ruined for sure - luckily everything was back to normal after about a day and a half.

E-commerce operators use Google’s Base service to upload products for Google’s product comparison shopping engine; companies and individuals rely on Gmail for critical email communications; Google’s AdWords program drives paid search traffic to millions of websites (though since this is such a money maker for Google I doubt we’ll see this go away any time soon).

The point of all this is to say it’s important to diversify your online partners and suppliers to maximize your business’s flexibility and ability to weather competitive threats. For us this has meant diversifying our ad placement beyond AdSense by partnering with vertical ad networks and shifting paid advertisements to Facebook and other platforms. Google still provides the bulk of our traffic and customers and we love all the free tools they provide - but it’s important to be cautious when relying on such a powerful market leader (as many eBay sellers can attest).

Rather than giving you a list of things to consider when choosing a web hosting service, I’ll keep this very simple: get a recommendation from someone you trust. Sure it’s easy to compare storage space, bandwidth, price, features, etc. among dozens of online hosting providers but you can’t quantify customer service and reliability which are arguably the most important things to consider.

We’ve been using the same hosting service, American Hosting, since 1999 (!) for our sites and we couldn’t be happier. American Hosting doesn’t have a super slick website, they aren’t the cheapest (though prices are reasonable), they don’t offer the most storage (but enough for most folks), and they certainly aren’t a big operation - and that’s why we like them. You can talk to them on the phone when you have an issue and unlike other services they don’t seem to have major turnover in support techs. We’ve recommended American Internet to all our clients and they have been extremely pleased as well.

Many years ago we decided to try out another hosting service (a Yahoo! branded option) and let’s just say it was a little too basic (and expensive) for our needs. If you’ve never built or managed a website you may want to stick with an option like Yahoo! but for most folks I don’t recommend it.

Anyway, this all comes back to my original point: get a recommendation, and not just from someone on a random internet forum. Find someone who knows what you’re capable of doing and what your needs are and let them help you find the right host. Everyone has different hosting needs and it pays to ask around until you find the web host that’s right for you.

Business Pundit posted an entertaining trip down memory lane covering 25 of the most spectacular internet failures over the last 10 years. This is certainly a good read if you’re feeling discouraged about your own internet business - at least you can say you didn’t blow through millions of dollars to get where you are today

My favorite failed internet startup on the list has to be the first one - GovWorks.com. For those who may not be familiar with the story, GovWorks was featured in a documentary titled Startup.com which gave an unprecedented inside look into the rise and fall of a real internet company in the late 1990s. This is perhaps my favorite documentary of all time and despite the sobering nature of this cautionary tale I somehow come away from watching it each time with a genuine sense of hope and excitement.

If you have some time today, read through the list and see what you can learn from these catastrophic internet failures. If nothing else it might make you feel good about your own struggle

I’ve been running websites for over 10 years now and in that time I’ve owned dozens of domain names but I never had a need to transfer my domain registrar. In fact one of my first domains, singletracks.com, is still at Network Solutions where I continue to pay $35 a year to renew my domain registration just because I was never entirely sure how difficult a transfer would be.

Over the past couple of years I’ve generally used Yahoo! or 1and1 to register new domains and today I probably have about a dozen domains with each company. Regular readers will recall my recent rant about Yahoo!’s domain renewal price increases that went in effect July 1, 2008, effectively raising prices 350% from a year ago. With some of my domains I wasn’t too concerned - I figured I would just cancel them once they came up for renewal since I wasn’t using them anyway. But then my company domain name (bluespruceventures.com) came up for renewal and I knew I had to do something.

So, I started the mysterious “domain transfer process” between Yahoo! Domains and 1and1. Yahoo! actually makes it easy to unlock your domain in the online control panel and even gives you the transfer code you need to initiate the move. 1and1 provides good documentation for transferring domains as well and after adding the domain to my cart just as I would a “new domain,” I was asked for the transfer code. Now at this point, the process was a bit surprising: 1and1 requires you to further verify you are the domain owner by responding to an email sent to the address on record with your domain registration. Fortunately I still had access to this address and was able to complete the verification.

After about 5 business days 1and1 confirmed the process was complete and I was able to update DNS settings to point the domain to my server. The great thing is that during the whole process I was able to keep the name servers going with the correct info so there was no drop in availability for my site (as far as I know).

So if you’re getting the business from your domain registrar with renewal price increases, don’t fret. Just transfer your domain - it’s easier than you might think!

Last week I talked about Alexa rankings and how the value of thosee rankings is questionable at best. Quantcast provides a similar free service but take a different approach which seems to yield more accurate info.

Quantcast gives webmasters a code snippet to place on their site to ensure that every visit is counted, regardless of whether visitors have installed a browser plug-in. Quantcast also estimates traffic for websites without the code snippet but for low traffic sites the accuracy of these estimates is on par with Alexa.

Unlike Alexa, Quantcast gives webmasters and advertisers alike insight into visitor demographics. The screenshot below shows the demographics for our camping and hiking website, TripleBlaze.com. As you can see TripleBlaze attracts a middle aged, middle income, slightly female audience. This is great for advertisers to understand but it’s also helpful for webmasters seeking to tailor design and content to their core audience. I wasn’t able to find any information on where Quantcast gets their demographic data but my guess is either a panel of web surfers (similar to Nielson) or zip-code based demography. If you need to rely on this info for large scale decision making I suggest looking into the methodology further.

Quantcast also provides tools for comparing visits and pageviews between multiple websites. This means you can keep tabs on your competition while understanding the online traffic patterns that affect your industry. Of course you can also see how your site ranks compared to your competitors but we already know this doesn’t mean much - though sometimes it can provide a nice ego boost

If you’re looking for a free internet rating service for research or finding advertisers, Quantcast is a great option. Sign up for your free tracking code to see who your site is reaching and how you stack up against the competition.

There are several services out there that seek to rank websites based on the number of viewers (traffic) each website receives. Alexa is an Amazon.com service that uses a panel of users who have installed a special browser plug-in to estimate website traffic. The browser plug-in is free and is available to anyone who wishes to use it.

It’s difficult to say how many folks have installed the Alexa browser plug-in but I’m estimating it’s between very few and not many. As such Alexa has a hard time providing useful estimates for low traffic websites since it’s pretty unlikely someone in the tiny Alexa pool will visit a site with very little traffic. When an Alexa user does visit a site, that site’s ranking can quickly jump from 10 million to 500,000 in a short period of time. So don’t stress if your site ranking goes up and down like a roller coaster - it’s normal.

So what is Alexa good for? For starters, it is a pretty good tool for understanding relative traffic patterns among websites. Plug in your site and your competitors’ sites and you can see how your traffic and rankings compare. You can also see which sites link to your site and your competitors’ sites and also get a list of related sites if you’re not sure who your competitors are.

Unlike some website ranking services, Alexa doesn’t give you an estimate of pageviews or visitors. Instead, Alexa displays a cryptic ‘reach percentage’ which is a measure of the percentage of global internet traffic a website receives. So, for example, cnn.com has a global daily reach of around 1.5% meaning 1.5% of global internet users view the site each day. But this begs the question: how many global internet users are there? Alexa isn’t telling us so the measure is largely useless unless we’re comparing relative numbers between sites.

If you already have a website, check out your Alexa ranking today and see how you’re doing compared to your competition!

Just when it seems that Yahoo! can’t make the customer experience any worse, somehow they find a way to sink to a new low. Back in 2005 I wrote about my difficulty canceling Yahoo! services (the ‘cancel’ form was mysteriously broken for months) and more recently about my Yahoo! Finance portfolio link redirecting to the Yahoo! search page. Now Yahoo! is raising the prices for domain renewals from $10 a year to $34.95 per year, a 350% increase!

Of course the price of everything is going up these days - from gas prices to food - so a little domain inflation is understandable - but 350%!? Even more frustrating is the fact that the cost of a new domain at Yahoo! remains the same - $9.95 for the first year. It’s a classic gotcha move - you don’t want to lose the domain after you’ve had it a year so what else are you gonna do but pay whatever Yahoo! says? Before July 1, 2008 domain renewals cost the same as new domain registrations ($10). If you’re thinking of registering a new domain, don’t let the intro price fool you - go with 1and1 or another registrar instead.

Fortunately the domain cancellation form is working now so when I received a renewal notice in my email yesterday I rushed to cancel before I was hit with the inflated charge. Yahoo! even *appears* to make it easy for you to switch registrars, giving you the necessary unlock code on the cancellation page; I guess they aren’t even interested in keeping their domain customers. Unbelievable how fast this company is sinking…

I wrote a couple weeks ago about poor web software interfaces and today I thought I’d share a few web interfaces that I think do a good job.

Word Press

Yep, it’s the interface I’m using to write this very post and the latest version is spiffy to say the least. The Word Press admin interface uses AJAX to auto-save your posts while you write and you don’t even need to leave the edit window to add photos and video clips to the visual editor. One gripe I have about the new interface: categories are below the fold meaning I have to scroll down to categorize my posts before scrolling back up to save. But dontcha just love the colors and fonts? Spiffy.

Gmail

Gmail has one of those interfaces that you either love or hate - or if you’re like me you start off hating it but end up loving it. Yes, it’s a different approach to email with threaded conversations but with all the enhancements over the years it’s really become a desktop-email app killer. My favorite features are the things that happen behind the scenes like the spam filtering (Gmail identified over 62,000 spam emails to me in the last 30 days alone) and the way Gmail is able to parse stuff like addresses and event dates to create links to Google maps and Google Calendar automatically. Heck, I even like the targeted ads and news items Gmail displays along with my messages and I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve even clicked on a few over the years.

Review App

Ok, so I’m a bit biased but I’m using the Review App interface every day and I gotta say it’s great. Actually I can’t take much, if any of the credit, since the guys at 45Royale did all the wireframing and design on the interface (and on this site as well). Organization is great, the layout is clean, and the interface uses AJAX in the right places to provide a responsive interface to a fairly complex process. If you’d like to take the Review App admin interface for a spin send us an email and we’ll set you up with our private demo.

There are actually a number of other great web app interfaces that I wanted to write about here but I think I’ll save those for another time. Until then, we’d love to hear which web app interfaces you think are great and which ones just aren’t cutting it. Post yer comments here!

Has anyone else noticed this lately: Whenever I click the bookmark for my Yahoo! Finance stock portfolio I am taken to the Yahoo! homepage instead of the correct page. This only happens the first time I click it; if I click the bookmark again, it usually goes to the correct page. I would understand if I were logged out of my account somehow but the link doesn’t redirect me to a login page. In fact, once I’m at the Yahoo! homepage I can clearly see I’m still logged in with links to my (unused) Yahoo! email inbox.

This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve noticed Yahoo! providing a poor user experience for the sake of profits and pageviews. If you’ve been following this blog for the past few years you’ll remember our complaint about the Yahoo! domains cancellation form. For more than 6 months the form, linked from our Yahoo! domains control panel, displayed a message saying the cancellation form was temporarily down for technical reasons. Inconvenient for customers who wished to cancel their domain renewals, a little too convenient for Yahoo! who continued to collect the $$ on domains that were automatically renewed.

Could this latest scheme be a ploy to inflate Yahoo! homepage pageviews by redirecting traffic from more popular Yahoo! products like Yahoo Finance? Reminds me of the trouble Apple got into recently by bundling the Safari for Windows download with iTunes updates. Forcing your customers to try out your other products is not only frustrating, it’s bad business.