I have noticed that many sites that were extremely popular 10 years ago, such as Fucked Company and Portal of Evil, are quickly fading from the Internet’s collective consciousness. Fucked Company started to grind to a halt about a year ago, but Portal of Evil is still going strong - it’s just that it seems to get almost no buzz now. Its Google PageRank is only 5.
I run an urban planning-related Web site that, as of this month, is 13 years old. It seems to have almost no buzz compared to a planning-related news site that went online six years ago, even though my site has about the same amount of traffic, and damn good Google juice. When I correspond with urbanism and architecture bloggers, many didn’t even know my site existed, even though it ranks at the top in Google searches for planning-related terms. When schools and planning organizations update their links page, they often remove the link to my site. Why? Many think that it was among the early pioneer sites that no longer exists; after all, how many Web sites that were around in 1994 are still active? The dot-com bust of the late 1990s/early 2000s was the online equivalent of a mass extinction event; I think people assume my site was also part of the carnage.
There seems to be this mindset that Web sites have a shelf life; that except for the big guns such as Google and Yahoo, Fortune 500 corporate sites, and newspaper sites, a Web site shouldn’t be more than five or six years old. Survival of the fittest, or just the belief that Web sites die after a certain time? Think about this: how much buzz does straightdope.com generate now compared to 2001?
I don’t know - I think we might just be seeing a second wave of dotcom-ness happening because of the current trend for websites with deliberately misspelled, or nonsensical names (flickr, digg, noodly, squidoo) - whereas before, many of them were a bit more serious in their naming - either just the name-of-the-already-existing-company.com, or a word describing their business.
Websites definitely stagnate. They need to have a constant source of new and updated material, and now we’re into the “community built” website phenomenon, where if you aren’t asking for audience participation, you’re probably going to fail as a website.
Nowadays, websites have blogs that update frequently and have an RSS feed so I don’t have to go to your website to read your news. They also have commenting systems, forums, friends, private messaging, profiles.
Some sites succeed without these “community” features, but they’re a dying breed. If you’re one of them, you need to update frequently with good, well written, and interesting articles.
The web is good because it’s constantly changing, constantly evolving, constantly adding. Your site may be old and ranked well in Google, but if you’re sitting on your hands someone is going to overtake you.
My site is definitely not stagnating. It has an active message board and gallery, and new features and content are constantly added. It doesn’t scream “Web 2.0” with gradients and goofy names, but it has the full complement of Web 2.0 amenities (RSS, aggregators, plenty of opportunity for user interaction, etc), and the design is more-or-less neutral; it’s not inspired by late 1990s Geocities glurge pages.
I’m wondering if a webmaster is doing everything right, it’s still possible for a site to fade in the collective consciousness mainly because it’s been around so long … really, if it’s inevitable for most. Consider the SDMB …
I wasn’t trying to say what you were doing wrong, elmwood. More just generalizing on why websites of yesteryear are now gone.
Quite frankly, no, I don’t believe that if a webmaster is doing EVERYTHING right, people will just stop using the service and visiting the website. Sure, users come and go, but if EVERYONE goes, then I reckon you’re not doing something right or someone else is doing it better.
If you’ve got an active community, but its shrinking, consider where they’re going and why and make those appropriate changes. It’s been mentioned before, but you may also need to promote and market to earn back some of the users you’ve lost. You can keep your website from fading away, but with all the competition you have to stay on your toes about it.
But no, I don’t believe one can do EVERYTHING right and still have a popular website fade away.
Keep in mind that Fucked Company was largely a product of the intersection of the dot-com crash of 2001 and and actually having this newish Internet thing for thousands of disgruntled former dot-com workers to post on.
Web sites can have a shelf life for any number of reasons:
-They don’t update their content or technology
-Their material is specific to a particular event or trend
-Their target audience outgrows them