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Big Websites Start Small

rosshill.com.au

34 pointsrosshill13 comments

The $200 figure was created by digg PR. Later on they decided that $1000 was more believable (also not true). And elance wasn't involved. The site was pretty ugly for the first 6 months. But that was in 2004, the barriers to entry are higher now.

agreed...if you could get away with putting up a crappy design in this day and age, pg would have made that a point for the YC startups.

Frankly design (as in look) does not matter as much as design (as in usability). You can get away with a very basic design as long as you are providing a valuable service. In other words what you can do with great programming and basic HTML skills will always be superior to what you can do with great Photoshop/CSS skills and little programming experience. This is the same reason why small restaurants with great food, but crappy look can easily outscore a million dollar establishment with poor food quality.

I think you are missing the point, which is have the simplest version of what you have in mind and build on top of it.

There's a certain minimum level of things that have to be done in terms of design, security, and even marketing that are extraneous to your actual functionality. I think the level for those things have risen over the last four years.

Focusing on making everything look slick upfront is an easy mistake to make. The first step is to get the essential "process" working. In some cases, the graphical design of the site is a part of that task, but in most cases, the core of the site's success is in whether the user workflows work well and people are using the site. So it's certainly wise to focus on that first.

doesn't a good interface help to make user workflows work well?

Yep, but it doesn't necessarily need to look good, it just needs to be intuitive. Sometimes that requires a good look, sometimes just a good feel.

Just look at craigslist, you certainly wouldn't call it a great looking design but it definitely works!

It really depends on your target demographic. Look at HN, where the most fascinating feature is it's simplicity and that's an ideal of beauty for hackers. But there's tons of people who would turn away because the layout is not shiny enough.

Definitely. I can't wait until gradients go out of style again.

Have you got the next million-dollar idea? Head over to RentACoder or eLance and make it happen.

I am totally against this kind of advice, i always believe people should not get into businesses which they don't understand; be it Internet, Stock markets, Space Tourism or selling Coffee. At the end of the day, you have to understand what you are doing and why you are doing it. With this kind of advice, you will have innocent(dumb) people thinking that, all they have to do is find a developer on RentaCoder and pitch him their million-dollar idea and they are rich. There are many more subtleties in starting a startup and like any other businesses, you have to be knowledgeable about it to make it a success.

"i always believe people should not get into businesses which they don't understand"

I don't think internet businesses are all about writing code... There isn't any strong correlation between web development skills and ability to build a successful web business...

If a person can conceptualize a service that he can take to market and spend some money from his pocket to get it developed... I'd say his chances of success would be higher than average web developer who develops something that might not have a market

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