It’s the modern truism: technology changes quickly. Web self-publishing service Geocities – and its amazing variety of garish color schemes with HTML enhancements – doesn’t even exist as a service any more. The internet and seemingly omnipotent smartphones have fundamentally changed our way of life. We’ve become used to getting everything we want, when we want it. Check the weather without opening a window or looking outside? Done. Send flowers to a loved one halfway around the globe? Done.
Unfortunately, human attention is a scarce commodity. There are things available on your website, and there are things people come to your site to find. If you’re lucky, those two sets of information are the same. Unfortunately, more often than not…they’re not. It’s frustrating to your visitors to discover that your site is insufficient or out of date for their purposes. But it’s likely to be more detrimental to you than to them. After all, your lost visitors can go somewhere else to find what they need. [The internet is huge, remember?!] Once they’ve left your space, chances are, they’re gone for good.
Some commentators have speculated that “attention transactions” will replace financial transactions as the focus of our economic system. What does that mean, exactly? Attention becomes currency. Customers spend their attention reading, internalizing, and sharing the content that they find valuable. Your investments in providing information can pay off only if someone spends more time than they would’ve by happenstance consuming your content. That return on investment multiplies every time someone thinks your content is so valuable that they share it with others (and there is little, if any, additional cost to you!).
BUT – to position yourself on the best possible way to provide valuable content, YOUR SITE CANNOT BE STATIC. Remember: people’s information needs change almost constantly. Every tick of the clock between when you last “updated” and when a visitor comes to your web space is more time that increases the information-attentional distance between you and your visitors. We all want the newest, shiniest things. Ari Herzog puts it simply:
Maybe your website doesn’t suck. But if you call it a web site, it does.
In other words, if your focus is simply on producing the best homepage or “about us” page or even on keeping the whole thing “up to date,” you’re probably missing out on a lot of opportunities to capture visitors’ attention and turn it into a meaningful relationship. The goal isn’t just to get a visitor to come to your website, but to keep them there and want them to return. [Think about it like this: when you invite a lot of people to your party, you don't want them all to show up and leave shortly thereafter...you want everyone to hang around, having a great time, invite their friends to crash, and tell everyone else about it the next day!] By making your site dynamic – meaning, personalized to different groups of visitors, according to their expected needs – you can make sure you don’t miss out on the opportunity to compete for visitors’ precious, limited attention.
500 Startups: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
If you’ve stumbled onto this article, it’s probably because you found us via our deluge of press on TechCrunch, The Next Web, Venture Beat, TechCocktail, etc. that Spinnakr among others have joined the most recent batch of 500 Startups companies.
500 Startups pirate map.
And since we’re in the business of targeting web content to your audience (invite code), we’re smart enough to know you probably want some dirt on the 500 Startups experience. And there’s a lot of dirt to go around, honestly. 500 Startups is an incredible place, but also incredibly weird.
So if you’ve ever thought of moving out to Silicon Valley and living the internet entrepreneur’s life in our pad, here’s the good, bad, and the ugly of it: More…