Four More Ideas - How to Create a great Website

Seth Godin has a quick read blog this morning on How to create a great Website.

Good ideas all. We (3 of us) just finished (for now) the 5Rules website, complete with Forum and company Blog. All 10 of Seth's principles rang true.

Here are a few more suggestions.

1. Steal ideas shamelessly. Don't copy! I mean take a look at your favorite websites and determine WHY they're your favorites (easy navigation, graphics design, simplicity, complexity, whatever...). Then morph those ideas into your own unique site. Our 5Rules site was inspired by 3 or 4 other sites in completely different businesses.

2. Buy/rent/Open Source vs. Build. For the sake of speed and cash, if your site requires things like a blog or a discussion forum, there are plenty of open source options for you out there. For 5Rules, we used Wordpress for our blog and are using Vanilla for our Product Forum. Our web development team (okay, it is one very talented guy) modified some designs we liked, to better brand our sites.

3. Give credit where it's due. If you're going to use someone's design and modify it, make sure you acknowledge the original designer. It's only right. Our modified blog design was based on Talian designed by VA4Business. And we say so in the blog footer.

4. With respect to Seth's idea #10 - Never Settle... Understand that websites grow, morph. You're never done. Make certain that the critical aspects work well, but perfect is not the launch criteria. Otherwise you'll stay in development forever.