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Google loves to brag about the amount of websites they have indexed. The part that no one talks about is how relevant 99% of these sites actually are. The timeless rule of "Free always wins" is taking a toll on the development of websites as conglomerates continue to wholesale "plug and play" technologies. There's too many websites that aren't successful.

Don't mistake me for a conservative who is too afraid to lose his job. I develop and support Drupal, a platform that strives to eliminate repetitive work and allows me to charge for what I actually want to do, create.

These 5 steps might seem broad, however they are essential in order to realize the full potential of an idea. I've seen websites stall right after months of development by lack of initiative on the crew/owner. Don't let that happen to your project.

Find the core

Ever heard of an elevator pitch? That's when you explain exactly what your company/project does in 30-60 seconds. It might seem easy at first to think "I can just explain it really fast". That's not going to work. You want the every word uttered to be important and concise. Before this helps anyone else understand your project, it will help you hone in on what the essence of the project is to begin with. If your idea is an already existing idea with a twist, embrace the twist and make that your selling point, otherwise your project is just rehash.

For more ideas watch Pitches at Techcrunch.com

Build a feature, release, repeat

This is called iterative development. A reason many projects get bogged down and abandoned in web development is usually feature overload which causes severe scope creep or sometimes the investor realizes it will take longer than he/she thought.

A way to curb this rate of failure is to develop the core features of your project and release them. Test them against a real audience, get invaluable feedback and then build on top of the existing code to improve it the right way.

A side-effect of this development process is the prevention of feature overload to new users. If your application has a very cluttered UI but your core message is straightforward, your bounce rate will be higher than if you executed your core message successfully. Your users will sign up to use simple and promised core features. Every feature after that will be something suggested by the users, it's win win.

Feedback is priceless

Feedback is golden, specially when it can help you decide what your next move is and not how bad your previous move (or several moves!) was. This is where you can turn the negative critic into a gold mine of ideas. If you gather feedback from users, use it to decide what feature to improve or remove. The key is to always work in "tangible" features, otherwise your application will be too hard to modify and it'll never be able to keep up (it will fail).

Promote

Everyone has a twitter account, it's fantastic, I suppose. The problem with twitter is the analogy of it being a stadium full of people and everyone is talking out loud (Don't forget the thousands of twitter robots that speak too!). A lot of companies can forget twitter as a means of promotion and use it instead as conversation tool for already existing users (like pizza hut, for example). I'm glad I got that off my chest.

If you found the core of your website. You are much closer to finding your keywords, which is what matters for SEO and PPC. Don't be afraid to start a PPC campaign if you are confident with your keywords. You can always hire an expert (like us!) to help you if it's important.

If you're launching an application, one of the sure fire ways to explode into fame is to negotiate your way into blogs like Techcrunch or Lifehacker. You have to figure out which market your website/application falls in, find the hubs and use them to your advantage.

Sell it well

Deliver what you promise and while your at it, throw the house out the window. If you can't give it all for free, give it real cheap. More often than not, the business model on the internet is wholesale, volume. If you have a blog/content website, you need to do your best to focus on quality content and unfortunately (for the lazy ones), lots of quality content.

If you are launching an application, give it away for some time, you need a buzz. Who's gonna talk about your app if no one is signing up? Your bounce rate is high and your ad words money is evaporating. Make it outrageous (at least while you show your worth) for users. Providing volume services is not extremely expensive, you can afford to give away memberships in exchange for some invaluable buzz.

Do you have any rules of your own to make a successful website? Tell us in the comments

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If you are a blogger that is going for gold and you've gone the path of Drupal, you probably want to know how to deal with a "Digg Spike" which means that when your site hits the frontpage of digg.com, there is a huge traffic surge of about 10k hits in about an hour.

There's a pretty interesting tool to help deal with this problem, this tool is called "Static Caching" and it is pretty simple in concept, it takes the rendered output of a page that is dynamically generated and stores it as an HTML file, next time someone hits that page, Boost will check for a cache file and if it finds it, will serve it up and bypass the database completely.

This is useful, specially in Drupal because it can take at LEAST 90+ queries to generate a page. multiply by the amount of users at any given point and, if you're on a shared host that usually leads to a server meltdown:

Here's a rough example:
Your website requires 100 queries to fully load. If you get 5000 visitors in one hour that is a grand total of 500,000 QUERIES
That might give you an idea as to why sites implode and the server throws up all over the place sometimes, it's too busy serving to serve all the others. On top of all that you have the bootstrapping process for Drupal which is CPU and memory intensive (Running all the PHP scripts - 10mb~ of ram a strap)

You have learned from this experience and you install Boost. This module stores all rendered pages viewed by anonymous users as HTML files and uses a special .htaccess file to check for the cached file and serve it up without ever touching Drupal at ALL. This means 0 queries to the database and 0 php ran. You spend all the memory and CPU power serving up static pages which is DRAMATICALLY lower than bootstrapping Drupal, a serious improvement.

Give the Boost module a try, be nice to your server. Boost Module on Drupal.org

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Our team is very small. We like it that way, it allows us to have personal connections with our clients and ourselves. Antonio and myself have been developing together for about 4 years now and I've learned a lot from it. Before we met I was mostly a designer for bands and shirt companies. My web experience was only based in some small businesses. Then as I progressed into web and more advanced theming I learned a really important lesson, don't just make the design nice but make it useful and well thought out. Usability is sometimes much more important than a pretty design, but ofcourse the golden egg is having both. The client has a responsibility to provide all functionality and content before a designer even starts a draft to assure a well thought execution of his ideas. Here are some examples of usability and breath-taking design working hand in hand....

http://www.Giraffe.net/

This site is phenomenal, this is a great example of all the functionality being preserved (menus, twitter updates, photo gallery) and still executing a design that would blow people away. Not one link seems out of place or forced and believe me that is a skill in it's own right. You immediately know what this site is about upon one glance. Nothing is confusing about the design, it's well thought out and well executed.

Grooveshark.com

This site allows even the newest users feel like a pro. Every tool is not only easily accessible but almost intuitive. It's flash interface also provides a slick presentation while operation almost like a piece of software rather than a website. You find yourself set up in seconds and that's what can determine if a client/listener will ever return. This site could not ever look this good without the programmers and designers working hand in hand.

Both sites are extremely well thought out and not just from a designers point of view but both a designer and programmer. This brings me to the main point. Always have your content or programming functionality (every button, every slider, every function) in hand before developing, it's very difficult to build or theme something when you have no idea what content is going in or what functions are being provided. If you don't know the purpose or items of importance your design will surely suffer. Designers and programmers and clients need to bring everything to the table before development starts, it is the only proper way. This seems like it would be a duh situation but most clients start development before they even start thinking about content and a developer has no choice but to run with it. Elitist designer attitudes and hands off clients cannot create well done web work. It takes two to make it out of sight.

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