Which Website – Anatomy Of Messed Up Marketplace:
Once upon a time, building and promoting websites, if you were good at it, was a great business.
However, the best things on the Internet have always either been free, or so inexpensive that anyone could afford them.
When the code standards and options were more complicated, due to the gradual learning curve of users and a huge generational gap with computer technology in general, there was a nice market gap for Internet professionals, including me, who built huge multi-million dollar service companies providing Internet technology – and some still do.
However, those days are coming quickly to an end. I always knew the day would come when a website, which is basically electronic storage on an Internet – connected computer, would become completely free, and that day is here. If you have ever heard of Myspace, Facebook, Yahoo360, and/or now over 1,000,000 others you know that you can get a website that will even rank on the search engines if you promote it properly for free. Ning.com, for instance, offers a full blown social media enabled community for free, and completely white-labled without ads for just over $50 per month. A setup like this was once something we could routinely charge thousands of dollars for and be the lowest bidder. As the price tag drops, Internet clutter increases and the effectiveness of these sites decreases: now everybody has several profiles that they do not use.
It is a fact that seasoned and up-to-date professional can still help you to have a great advantage over your less tech-savvy competitors, but the day is coming when these services are so standardized as to be ridiculously inexpensive, and much less profitable than in the past. The business will shift back to a basic consulting model, with less profit: and, with Indian companies spamming your inbox with cut rate offers daily, (some good, some ridiculous) profits in the website design business are already shrinking, and the selling and closing process has been messed up beyond simple profitability, and has become so confusing that nobody knows what to buy or from whom.
We will continue to offer the truth here; but we are finding ourselves less and less able to combat the host of misinformation being promulgated in the spam factories, and the business has changed a great deal, for us, and for everyone.
The one thing I can promise is that you always find the truth here.
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Here is a great related article:
http://www.matthewferrara.com/next-generation/internetindependence
You are absolutely on point. The internet has become so cluttered with redundant and/or useless information that it is next to impossible to legitimately showcase a service that is better than a competitors. I still see websites that are still done from the ground up ( ie: the “moving globe jpeg” sites ), that are a lot easier to be done with better knowledge and an already-built CMS.
Everyone is attached to Google, but would not be surprised to see a comeback in better organized directories. As the internet gets bigger, and money is splashed around less, the branding of the sites ( along with SEO ) will become more important in the short-term, and the partnerships through advertising and linking during exposure campaigns will guarantee them some good spot as Google and other data organization sites begin to consolidate or control the rampant information.
Or there will be unmitigated chaos for the rest of our existence. No one prefers the latter, so better organization will come. But since much of content-organizers are content-rich blind, much of the placement of information might be emphasized with longevity and reputation through links ( like currently but wouldn’t be surprised of mass de-listings of non-popular sites. ).
Well maybe this is an opportunity to get back to simple clear messaging rather than wizbang coding or SEO trickery.