(by 3 people)
There are two kind of websites - websites that promote the business and websites that are the business. This lens suits for both but especially for websites that are the business.
Websites for public have traditionally been more or less like newspapers. What has been printed, has been printed and it is the Word from highest authority whoever it might be. Websites targeted towards private people have been mainly only information delivery. As popularity of more two way internet services like Amazon.com, LinkedIn.com, Flickr.com have already shown, these one way channels are not what will be the future winners.
What is then a killer website?
Even though the answer is not straightforward to the all businesses, there is really simple quideline to quide you in creating killer website. I believe only those internet services that satisfy the needs or wants of their target groups people will be successes. Why? Because internet is run by the free will of people. We cannot force people to use things that they don't want to use and only those the websites that satisfy people inner needs and wants will eventually get the eyeballs.
To find information and then possibility to buy something might be only concern of corporations but not definitely the what our inner soul wants. It is time to start opening your minds and start thinking from the people, not from the technology. You might think, what these needs of the people are. Don't go too far, you are already there. Think about what would you really want, it is most probably same as what your users would want. Deliver it and soon you find a way to create a killer website.
Killer Website Basics
Design for people, keep it simple, add value, include not disturbing, powerfull and ubiquitous sales messages, optimize for search engines (SEO), use ready web services.
- Startup Websites That Work
- This list is basically for websites that promote business but can be used as ideas for creating sales copy in websites that itself are the service or product.
1. What will you do for me? What does the product do?
2. Who is it for?
3. How does it work? Here, a picture (or a short video) is worth a thousand words.
4. Why your product and not something else?
5. What does it cost?
6. How can I try it?
7. Who's behind it?
8. Where are you?
9. Keep me posted: Sometimes, customers may be interested in your product, but just not now.
10. Look Alive! - Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization
- What is SEO, SEO tools compared, How to hire an SEO firm.
Whats new in regarding web trends
- What Is Web 2.0 by O'Reilly
- Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software
- Web 2.0: Compact Definition? by Tim O'Reilly
- "Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices"
- Are You Ready for Social Software?
- What is social software? Let Stowe Boyd tell you. "Social software is likely to come to mean the opposite of what groupware and other project- or organization-oriented collaboration tools were intended to be. Social software is based on supporting the desire of individuals to affiliate, their desire to be pulled into groups to achieve their personal goals. Contrast that with the groupware approach to things where people are placed into groups defined organizationally or functionally. "
- A Group Weblog on Social Software
- Keep Yourselves in the game of social software with this blog. Corante is the world's first blog media company.
- Web 2.0 Innovation Map
- Are you interested to see where in the world are these new web 2.0 software developed. Look at here.
- Web2.0 website list
- Check this great list. Before deciding what to build, evaluate others and find your niche.
You may want to check also 250 Resources on Complete List of Web 2.0 Products and Services .
Understand The Way Ahead
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
Amazon Price: (as of 07/25/2008)
The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
Amazon Price: (as of 07/25/2008)
Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
Amazon Price: $26.40 (as of 07/25/2008)
The Perfect Store: Inside eBay
Amazon Price: $10.87 (as of 07/25/2008)
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means
What do our brains, world wide web and a coctail party have in common? They are all networks.
Amazon Price: $10.20 (as of 07/25/2008)
I Try to Capture the Essence of Web 2.0
- Add Trust
Web 2.0 ties information and webpages to real life people. It means transformation from faceless information to information originated by real life person. Information trustworthiness is also generated increasingly by reactions from the others (e.g. diggs, comments, trackbacks, social bookmarks, evaluations, blogrolls). - Add Virtual Career, respect generation and responsibility
In web 2.0 world there is possibility to create various virtual careers. All my actions affect to the respect and repution of my virtual career (that connects many times to real career or real life person). And the career is the thing people take care of and don't want to ruin with any disastrous bahaviour. This encourages to high quality interaction and content! - Remove Loneliness
Western society makes people lonelier and lonelier. We don't have to look at our banker's eyeballs or don't even know who he might be? Sociality through internet - easy, always on, enhanced in web 2.0. - Add Power
The content and significance of information comes increasingly from the users themselves instead of the corporations. That's the wanted empowerment web 2.0 offers to people.
Develop Fast & Economically
- Mashup style: Plug in to superAPI's like Google Maps, Flickr.com, Amazon S3 and others
NOTE: Check the terms of use. E.g. Google Maps does allow only a very limited use to the commercial use.
- Use fast and thin Agile methodologies
- No DSP's (Dinosaur Software Platforms:) but Ryby on Rails, PHP & MySQL or others like these
- Giving enterprise software practices an 'angioplasty' by Dion Hinchcliffe
- Web 2.0 Development Ideals
- Agile Alliance
- Check the Manifesto for Agile Software Development
* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
* Working software over comprehensive documentation
* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
* Responding to change over following a plan - Agile Software Startups
- Learn about The Agile Startup Manifesto
"Through our experience, we have come to value:
1. Useful software over a comprehensive business plan.
2. Customer revenues over external funding. Customer revenues are the clearest evidence that we are solving the right problem.
3. Responding to change over following a plan.
4. Building It well over building to sell. - Code Snippets
- Don't invent it once more - use already made one.
- Reasons Why Your Startup Should Use Ruby On Rails (RoR)
- Tips to select software platform for startups.
- Userscripts.org - Universal Repository for the Scripts
- Scripts repository - over 2 000 000 scripts. Use to find a way through and share your personal way through.
Use Mashups & SuperAPI's
To Make Your Software Development A Killer
Google Maps Hacks
Amazon Price: $19.79 (as of 07/25/2008)
Hacking GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth (ExtremeTech)
Amazon Price: $19.79 (as of 07/25/2008)
Flickr Hacks: Tips & Tools for Sharing Photos Online (Hacks)
Amazon Price: $18.24 (as of 07/25/2008)
Yahoo! Hacks: Tips & Tools for Living on the Web Frontier (Hacks)
Amazon Price: $18.96 (as of 07/25/2008)
Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Smarter Searching (Hacks)
Amazon Price: $24.95 (as of 07/25/2008)
Web 2.0: Web Services Mesh-up
This was not available yet (04/11/2006)
Amazon Price: (as of 07/25/2008)
OnDemand Online Storage
- Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service
- Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet.
And think about the pricing:
* Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
* $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
* $0.20 per GB of data transferred.
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers. - Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon S3
- Forbes.com analysis of Amazon S3.
- Towards politically neutral infrastructure: Amazon's S3
- Jon Udell's more detailed technology test and analysis.
- Coming: Google Drive Online Storage - What we know so far
- Dramatic predictions of Google taking over the world, secret disclosures of a new stealth product at a Google analyst meeting, outing of the story by bloggers, and subsequent purging of the public data by Google to keep things hidden from the public and competitors.
- Coming: Windows Live Drive - Rumours and hints
- Brutal competition. A stock going nowhere. Microsoft is in crisis, so Bill Gates has unleashed his new hire, software genius Ray Ozzie, to remake the company - and conquer the Web.
Ray Ozzie tells something about Microsoft's online storage
"Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data. It even has a name for that future service: Live Drive. With Live Drive, all your information - movies, music, tax information, a high-definition videoconference you had with your grandmother, whatever - could be accessible from anywhere, on any device."
Killer Web Programming Books
Ajax in Action
Amazon Price: $29.67 (as of 07/25/2008)
Foundations of Ajax (Foundation)
Amazon Price: $30.60 (as of 07/25/2008)
Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide (Pragmatic Programmers)
Amazon Price: (as of 07/25/2008)
Core Web Application Development with PHP and MySQL (Core Series)
Amazon Price: $31.49 (as of 07/25/2008)
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Concepts, Technology, and Design (The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl)
Amazon Price: $34.49 (as of 07/25/2008)
Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wrox Professional Guides)
Amazon Price: $26.39 (as of 07/25/2008)
Innocent Code: A Security Wake-Up Call for Web Programmers
Amazon Price: $40.15 (as of 07/25/2008)
Get Visitors - Marketing
* Be in the top in search engines (SEO, Google)
* Create fresh webpages that have real substance
* Link to hot bloggers
* Be in the future search engines (see below)
Search Engine types of the future:
* Eurekster.com Swicki (community search)
* Del.icio.us (social bookmarking)
* Digg.com (vote)
* Technorati.com (blogs)
* Squidoo.com (voted professional aggregations)
* Rollyo.com (personalized search engine)
* Flickr.com (media search)
* Google (webpages, media, pagerank + future solutions)
To be visible in these future search engines is one key of online marketing.
- Online Marketing - Blogs, SEO, PR By Lee Odden
- Online Marketing Blog covers web 2.0 and search engine news, resources, products and tactics including search marketing, RSS, blog marketing and online public relations.
- How Get Traffic To Your Website by Veindia.com
- This is great list of howto do internet marketing. It is not question of money, it is question of work and skills.
10. Use viral marketing strategies to "infect" people with the desire to learn more about your product!
9. Use online business networking communities to hook up with other entrepreneurs for link swaps and joint marketing ventures
8. Become a recognized "name" in your niche market by participating in newsgroups, discussion forums, or blogging networks
7. Get your visitors to tell their friends about you!
6. Encourage people to "get busy" with your site with interactive traffic generators
5. Increase your site's exposure by swapping links with other sites
4. Get the message out about your site by giving away free content
3. Be one of the first sites people see listed when they search your keywords in the free search engines
2. Use e-mail promotions to present your visitors with offers they CAN'T refuse!
1. Build an army of affiliates to drive TONS of traffic to your site for you!
Stand Out and Get The Eyeballs - Marketing
Winning Results with Google AdWords
Avg. Customer Rating: 
Amazon Price: $24.99 (as of 07/25/2008)
List Price: $24.99
Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars
Avg. Customer Rating: 
Amazon Price: $15.61 (as of 07/25/2008)
List Price: $22.95
Search Engine Optimization for Dummies
Sorry about this "dummy" book but people have found just this book to tell them what is SEO and how to do it.
Avg. Customer Rating:
Amazon Price: (as of 07/25/2008)
List Price: $24.99
Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site (Ibm Press)
Avg. Customer Rating:
Amazon Price: $31.49 (as of 07/25/2008)
List Price: $49.99
101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site: Filled with Proven Internet Marketing Tips, Tools, Techniques, and Resources to Increase Your Web Site Traffic
Avg. Customer Rating: 
Amazon Price: (as of 07/25/2008)
List Price: $29.95
Make Conversions - How to Sell Online
Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results
Like one of the reviewers of this book Merrill K. Evans said "Marketing + Web Design = Winning Site" and here is the must read marketing part.
Avg. Customer Rating:
Amazon Price: (as of 07/25/2008)
List Price: $25.95
Web Copy That Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy Every Time
Internetl selling is unlike any other selling. You have only few lines and a not a wannabe client giving about 8 seconds of his valuable time. This is the area where there has to be totally different kind of tools to make converts. This book tells you how.
Avg. Customer Rating:
Amazon Price: $14.93 (as of 07/25/2008)
List Price: $21.95
