How not to launch

So you have secured one of the coolest domains on the planet.  Heck, you can’t even believe it was available! So you snatch it up right away.  You have a great idea for a web product that might exist but isn’t being done correctly, and you are positive you can do it better. You also have a great platform to bring it all to life not to mention a pretty cool concept for a logo.   So you do it… and the people come… only, there is no about page, there is no intro text, in fact, there is nothing to put everything on the site in context.  So they leave and never come back.

This would be BlackPower.com…

Now, I have spent a bit of time perusing the site and I THINK it’s a news site of some type?  I can’t be sure though.  The logo only says “for open minds only”.  That still doesn’t let me know what it is. However, the content leads me to believe that it must be a news site. I had to explore longer than I would have liked to figure that out and I still can’t be sure.  If it is a new site, I don’t know what perspective the news is supposed to be from.  Despite the cool URL and Logo, I still don’t have enough information to figure it out.  Theoretically, I guess I could take the time to go through and read a bunch of stories until I figured it out, but, why would I do that?  I’ll just go somewhere else.

It’s really not that the audience is stupid… it is just important to remember that when people browse the internet, a lot of times they are busy doing other things and don’t want to take the time to have to figure out your site when there are at least dozens of other sites offering something similar… if they can even figure out what it is you are offering.  Initial messaging, though it may seem silly, is important.  You can do it with a good logo, the right imagery on the front page or by having a simple text blurb and name/titling (which should be done for SEO anyway).   As best practice, especially with something new, there should also always be an about page of some type.  It’s just manners.  Plus, (again) it’s great for SEO purposes as well.

Anyway, BlackPower.com is too ambiguous of a title with too know exactly what the site is, and there is no big Beta sticker on it… so, for now, I am going to say it kind of sort of FAILED.  However, it is easily fixable.  It just needs to be positioned so that we know what it is.