Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

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.

After “seeding” your website with relevant, useful information it is important to continue your data growth through continuous feeding. In this context, feeding means three things:

1. Give users the chance to feed your information for you. If you have a blog, turn on comments. If your website sells books, give your customers a way to add their reviews. Wikis in particular make feeding particularly easy since virtually anyone can add to articles. Let your website users do some of the watering and feeding for you and your data ranch will grow by leaps and bounds.

2. Periodically review your data for accuracy and relevance. Sometimes data may begin to wither due to the passage of time. If it’s out of date, update it or add relevant caveats.

3. Find new ways to use your data. Your data can often times fuel itself by adding just a little interactivity to your website. Allowing users to create lists, for example, organizes your data and generates additional pages in the search engines. Multiply your existing data by presenting it in new and useful ways.

Not just anyone can be a successful data rancher. Like meat-space ranching, data ranching requires a passion for your product. That means if you’re gathering information about mountain biking, you’ll be much more successful you’re a mountain biker yourself. You’ll know what types of information your readers and contributors are looking for and you’ll be able to seed, feed, and weed much more effectively than if you were an outsider.

Ask a rancher why he does what he does and rarely will the answer be about money. It’s usually a love for the outdoors or a passion for animals that gets folks into the business. Do ranchers go into ranching because cattle futures are set to rise on the market? Nope. They do it because they love it.

In keeping with the data ranch metaphor, it’s important to remember that you can’t grow your website without doing a little seeding, feeding, and weeding. Today I’ll talk about the importance of seeding your data ranch and how it is critical to kick-starting any online endeavor.

The first mistake many website creators make is expecting contributors to show up just because a website exists. Set up a forum with an appropriate subject heading and people will just flock, right? Wrong. Without content your potential members will be gone before they even arrive.

For some it may be tempting to “seed” their new website with questions to stimulate conversation among passers-by but I’m here to tell you from my experience this doesn’t work. In fact the ratio of useful information to “seed questions” should be at least 5 to 1 in the early days of your ranch and even more if you want to grow quickly. We’ve all seen websites that have extensive FAQ sections but the key here is that all those questions have answers!

Once you’ve seeded your data ranch with useful information about your subject it’s important to leave the door open to additional information and feedback from your users. This means turning comments on in your blog software, enabling user reviews, and giving members maximum control over forum posts. In fact I recommend allowing anonymous submissions early on to encourage content growth