Your Ways On Make A Successful Website

What are your ways on making a successful website?

1) SEO compliant, Marketing. Backlinks can be useful, but I dont use them.
2) Good design, ever pondered the internet and found a site that doesnt look very good and close the window/tab straight away? Well, a good design cuts down the percentage of people doing that.
3) Depending on the subject, add realism to it. For example, I want to make a website to do with 3D development, I would have to add 3D artwork on the main page to gain much more attention, ie: http://gnomonology.com/

Success is going to be in the eye of the beholder. If you're selling something on your site, success = profit (revenue - cost of goods - cost of selling goods). This kind of success means you have something to sell, that someone wants to buy, and that you can route the person who wants to buy to your site at a minimal cost (search engines are good for this) and close the transaction with a minimal number of dead shopping carts (good design usually helps here).

If you just want traffic as your measure of success, then you need to focus on making sure a link to your site is everywhere your potential readers are going to hang out. In this case, it's SEO, paid marketing, postings to blogs and forums where potential readers hang out, press releases, contacting user groups related to what your site is about, that kind of stuff.

know who your target audiences are ..

Something that actually provides a service or fulfills a need.

Originally Posted by Blue Ire Something that actually provides a service or fulfills a need.

If this were enough... then Microsoft wouldn't be so successful. You can have a wonderful product everyone wants, but no one knows about. Or you could follow the MS model: have an average product, make everyone think they want it by marketing the heck out of it, and make lots of money.

Where, exactly, did you say that for this thread you were defining success in purely monetary terms?

Success (for me) is about much more than money, see above.

Originally Posted by Blue Ire Where, exactly, did you say that for this thread you were defining success in purely monetary terms?

You can have a service or fulfill a need, but if no one wants it or knows about it, then is it really all that "successful" or is it just successful in your own eyes? In which case, why would Acid even bother to ask?

A website should be professional looking, provide a service, lots of free stuff to download, etc
All this brings visitors again and again

It should have a guest book too