Michielb.nl

According to Molblog and Metrixlab, this is the list of Top 10 'worst website' in Holland. Here's the list, along with the ranking of each website in the Top 20 Websites of 2008 in terms of Traffic according to Multiscope.

1. Telegraaf (19)
2. Hyves (2)
3. KPN (-)
4. MSN (7)
5. Startpagina (9)
6. Marktplaats (4)
7. Mediamarkt (-)
8. Belastingdienst (-)
9. Postbank (10)
10. Rabobank (18)

7 out of 10 of the worst websites are in the Top 20 most visited websites

• People hate all sites. The most popular ones get most hate.
• It really doesn't pay to invest in usability. Being bad may actually help.
• The most visited sites fill a basic need. Sell stuff, do banking, stay in touch. Bad site or not, you need to get this done.
• The most visited websites get visited so much because they are so bad. You can never find what you need, so you give up and come back later.
• Notably absent in the Top 10 worst sites are Google and Buienradar.nl. They serve only one purpose. People like single purpose websites.

Quite strange. Do you have another conclusion?

Posted by Michiel at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last night I made something that got Techcrunched in a matter of hours. Here are some things I learned that you may find useful.

1. Do something

It all started with me making a Top Twitter Clients list, based on number of tweets per client. I twittered about this, around 7:55pm last night.

2. Listen to feedback

One of my followers Joost de Valk responded at about 8:45 by asking if this list could also be made per unique user, and then mention the number of tweets per client. This would show something about the usage of those clients.

3. Respond to that feedback right away

I respect Joost a lot and think he's one of the smartest people I follow. So I made that list. I'm an old-fashioned 'fake programmer' so I hack everything in Perl and PHP. I made a second version of my logging script, and made a Perl script that calculated the ranking based on unique users. I believe in Perl and static files, it's very easy to add or change things quickly.

4. Show that you listened

And I twittered about this, at 9:18 so this took me about half an hour. I think it is crucial that I did this quickly. If I responded the next day, it would have been out of the mind of Joost de Valk, or he might have missed my tweet because he wasn't online. Joost sent a tweet to his 2500 followers about this new list at 9:24. He liked the fact that I made this new version so quickly, so he promoted me.

5. Be ready for a snowball effect

This promotion by Joost got me a lot of traffic via Stumbleupon, and at around 10:45 an article appeared on Techcrunch about this study. Since it linked to just a static file, my server held up fine.

6. Have a good site

And then: nothing. On the very simple list page, there is no navigation to other parts of my site. So besides the visitors, I really didn't get any value from this. The Twitstat site has very poor navigation, so this traffic is nice but pretty much lost for my 'business' of making people use the Twitstat Mobile client.

Hope this helps you. Let me know in the comments.

Posted by Michiel at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)