Some thoughts about websites
A website resembles a real estate property in some sense. A landlord tries to develop his property (whether a residential building or a mall) by making continuous improvements and aiming at attracting customers. In a residential building he wants to have tenants occupy the property. In the case of a mall, the aim is to attract people (increase footfall). Similarly, a website needs, first and foremost, to drive traffic in order to generate revenue. Traffic then converts to either sales or ad revenue.
The initial effort required for a new website to acquire some baseline traffic, could be similar to the efforts of a new mall to build some initial patronage. There is a lot of hard work involved in the early stages to properly market the enterprise. Then, after some momentum is build, it’s an easier task; still demanding but easier.
If you have been a regular visitor to shopping malls, you wouldn’t miss the regular events organized to attract visitors. The process of organizing these events is a demanding task which someone could easily compare to the procedure of scheduling the updates of a site’s content.
A lot of metrics are incorporated in both cases. Website traffic & Analytics are put in place in a similar fashion to the footfall counters in a mall. Demographics are taken into consideration too. In addition, SEO tools help make the content more discoverable just like influencers’ posts help a place become well known and mainstream. Rich media assume the role of smells, music, light and sensory stimulation in a property.
A website would most certainly fail to keep their audience if it is not regularly updated. Just as easy, a real estate can fall into a state of decline, should their administrator fail to renew visitors’ interest.
Lastly, none should fail to notice that a real estate is just a property on a piece of land. In a similar fashion, a website is also a property but placed in a different, digital type of land.
