9 main enemies you have when running a website

Published By zooboole

Disclaimer: The word enemy is used in this post as a problem. And this post has nothing to do with racism problems. Beside most parts are based on my opinion and my personal experience, therefore there is no fact/study to back them up.

This might sound weird to many of you but it's actually an undeniable fact. You have serious enemies you must fight when you are running a website in general. I am probably new in managing websites, or I don't have coined experience in web servers, and of the whole web infrastructure, but if as a new I can notice only nine, I believe those who have giant websites like Google, or Facebook, have more they are facing on daily basis. I would like to share with you those problems and explain how I conceive them.

While I am not expecting this to be a universal truth, I believe these problems might be slightly different from one website to another or from one context to another, or you can even name them with different words depending on how you see it or how it occurs in your cases.

I write this to let anyone who has a web site, or whoever is planning to have one, to know about their existence and therefore plan consequently.

Be aware these problems may also not be noticeable based on how your website functions, or based on its size. A company portal website will not face same issues as a website with internal users. A website which displays information for its users will not necessary face the same issues as the one collecting information from its users and then displays a feed back or saves it, and so on.

While this is my point of view, and my level of understanding and interpretation of those problems, I am expecting you to have a bit knowledge of it or more. Many, who are more acquainted with the field may define those problems better or differently. meanwhile, those who have less knowledge about some or all these problems may feel lost in their existence or how to figure out and when to find them.

Besides this list isn't, in any case, a complete one, but I believe it will be a plus or a reminder to most of you. Here I have listed them based on their frequency of occurrence or how obvious they can be:

1. Bugs

Far way from being living insects, bugs are usually little/big problems developers face when coding. They are in many forms. They are usually codes/part of it that makes software to act up.

According to https://www.techopedia.com/definition/24864/software-bug-

A software bug is a problem causing a program to crash or produce invalid output. The problem is caused by insufficient or erroneous logic. A bug can be an error, mistake, defect or fault, which may cause failure or deviation from expected results. Most bugs are due to human errors in source code or its design.

That's the problem. Websites misbehave from time to time because of these bugs in their source code. You have taken your time to check and test your website, but once launched, it's very hard to escape bugs. Sometimes you click on links on the website and it doesn't take you to where you were expecting, or it loads so slowly. These are examples of bugs manifestations.

Many things can be the cause of those bugs on running websites: increasing size of data, a non-validated input, design mistake, a short plan of website's life-time, abuse of terminologies, website not sufficiently tested, etc.

Note that aside from those technical issue which are called bugs, you have some behaviors on your website that don't affect the actually working on your website but they can be considered as bugs by your visitors. Some of them are: showing pop-ups just at the entrance of website, auto-play videos, background music, showing site loading time, site not being mobile-friendly, ads everywhere, etc.

So, understand bugs as something/a behavior on your website that doesn't please you as a developer or your visitors. And this is something you should be worried about.

2. Your CSS files

Though this is purely a technical problem, it's worth being mentioned in this list. If you don't know what CSS is, it stands for Cascading Style Sheet, it's actually the code of a website that gives it its design and beauty.

CSS allows you to define your website layout, and its beauty at a point in time of your website's life time, precisely while developing it. So after launching, the website grows, changes, and maybe needs to be extended/expanded. At that moment you start modifying and improving/increasing your style sheets. Probably this may not cause any problem if your website is one/two years old, but imagine when it becomes five to ten, or even twenty years old.

Those who created the style-sheet are no more with you, or they are old(they can become many possible things after that time anyway); even if you are still the one managing it, what is less probable. So, the new team needs to understand the style sheets in order to be able to edit them or they will have to add their own stuff to overwrite the previous ones, and so on and so forth and the size of your website's CSS can considerably influence its speed of loading if it becomes too heavy.

Besides, with the arrival of the responsive web designing, you have to maintain your CSS according to different devices view-ports. what can become a serious nightmare in time?

For normal users with less experience in coding, you can notice this problem at some parts of your site that are not display the way you want them to be, or some sizes are incorrect, or some content overflows here and there, or some icons are not displaying, etc.

I, therefore, classify it as one of the immediate problems you should pay attention to if you are running a website.

3. Visitors

Image by openhousecourse.com

Visitors constitute a very big problem as far as I am concerned. Visitors/users are people who come on your website and I order them by four categories:

- New visitors

New visitors are people who visited your website for the first time. They may come because this is the first time they are meeting your website or that was the first time they've noticed something good on your website, and many other reasons. Actually new visitors are hard to reach and very hard to maintain. It's because of them you will have to spend a lot of resources(ads, time, marketing) in order to reach more of them. They can be the cause of your high bounce rate, because they are not acquainted to your platform, they don't feel at home yet, they make their decisions very fast.

Every day your have to work very hard in order to reach as many as possible new visitors.

- Old visitors/Returning visitors

Those ones have been on your website at least once already and they are coming back. Usually they are easy to grab for long time. They might be on your site because they like it, or you posted something they like or they are curious about. They might also be coming back to check if you have improved so far, or to see how far have you been in your bullshit. Ahahaha. At that point they can also become a veritable menace for your bounce rate, your commenting feeds, your feed back systems.

For them you always have to get a tailored solution in order to keep them and coming every time, which can become a serious headache because of diversity in our personality and tastes. You can start adding/removing some modules of your website in order to fit their needs.

- Curious visitors

Curious visitors are visitors who come to see if your website is nice, or to see what you have been able to do. Mostly they can be your competitors/enemies coming to see what is going on on your website. If that happens, you might be lucky, because they may take some time looking around, and that is good. But on the other hand, they might also be the source of some serious attacks and misbehavior, which can be hacking tests, bad comments, never sharing your website, and they may never come back again.

But their main characteristic is that they are there to make sure if you are doing the direction they want or they don't. So you have to pay great attention to such users in order to prevent their misbehavior.

- Accidental visitors

Accidental visitors are those who arrive on your website through many sub-referrals or to whom some other people ask to open your website for them to see/verify something. They didn't plan to be on your website. So they have no taste for it and they don't plan to have. For those ones you really have to work hard on your website to attract their attention and keep them.

In all, users are people every single website cares about. A website without visitors is almost useless. They are your audience. And keeping an audience is never a little job.

4. Servers Resources

Image by blog.webwerks.in

Your server resources can become a big issue in the lifetime of a website. This includes the bandwidth, hard disk space, memory RAM, SSL certificates, and the time it stands up. To a small website, this might not be a serious problem but for a giant like Google or Facebook, it's a very serious problem.

Nevertheless, it's something you must always pay attention to from the first day you make your decision to host your web to the end of its life-time.

5. Competition

Image by ineteconomics.org

Like I said above, competitors can be a very big problem. Also, you must always keep them in mind and keep your website updated. Competition can highly influence how you manage your website.

It's always on your neck, and you must deal with it in order to rise the bar. You can't just neglect it. You look at what they are doing and your excel, then they look at what you have just done and excel again, and the whole process continues.

6. Alexa Rank

Image by www.tricksage.com

Alexa's traffic estimates are based on data from our global traffic panel, which is a sample of millions of Internet users using one of over 25,000 different browser extensions. In addition, we gather much of our traffic data from direct sources in the form of sites that have chosen to install the Alexa script on their site and certify their metrics. However, site owners can always choose to keep their certified metrics private.

Our global traffic rank is a measure of how a website is doing relative to all other sites on the web over the past 3 months. The rank is calculated using a proprietary methodology that combines a site's estimated average of daily unique visitors and its estimated number of page views over the past 3 months. We provide a similar country-specific ranking, which is a measurement of how a website ranks in a particular country relative to other sites over the past month.

Source: http://www.alexa.com/about

Alexa is that website which estimates your order in a line of all(almost) websites in the world. It determines like the website so so in N0. 1 or N0. 5 most visited website in the world. And they can also estimate it relatively with another website in specific countries.

Why you should worry about this rank is that most advertisers and other people who care about how serious your website is, use Alexa rank to check that.

So, it's a big combat every day to get your website closer to the head of the snake: get the smallest rank.

7. Google Adsense

Image by www.haktansuren.com

Google Adsense is the Google program that helps website owners to make some income by accepting to display ads from Google's publishes.

As strange as that can be, this is a serious metric that can be very hard when you have a website because the harder you work on your content quality the more money you make.

8. Hackers

Image by misantropey.com

This one I don't need to say much. I believe if you have a website you are already aware that it can be hacked at any time.

But, your website being hacked can mean many things depending on the case. It can be that they put your site down, delete some parts/content from it or steal some information or your user's database, or they can take over your website altogether and you lose it entirely. Pray. aha ha ha.

So, you need to keep your head up, follow good coding practices, and validate your users' inputs, in order to protect it from, at least, some level of hackers.

9. Racism, xenophobia, Language barriers

Casually this is a serious problem. And you may ask me why and how?

Good, To my opinion, many people will not visit your website just because it's coming from a Jew, a French, an African, or an Indian. They just don't have anything to learn from you so pfff, they leave, or they will never click on your links. Oh, this is an Indian/Chinese thing, I don't need to share it.

Many others have that problem of not accepting anything that's not from where they are from. If, unlikely for you and your website, you are not from that same place like them, forget. They will never comment, sign up/in, share it, etc.

These two points might not be obvious and might sound too opinionated but I have a strong faith they exist and really affect how your website does online, no matter its type. You can read a similar point on Techcrunch.

As far as the language barriers are concerned, everyone is in the same boat. There are more than 7 billion in the world, with thousands of different languages. So if you want to reach out as many people as possible, language is key.

The other social aspect you should notice here is that the internet is full of types of people of all ages. Judgment online may come from a child, a young or an elderly person who have different experiences in life, in different contexts. So, never be surprised and prepare your website based on that. One thing you should know is people are great on the Internet, you can be surprised sometimes to see that an unknown person from nowhere in this globe can save your life, so never be afraid of starting up something online

Conclusion

As surprising as this may be, these are nine serious cases a website can be exposed to. As a manager/owner, I think it's important you consider them frequently to avoid any surprises. I fully grant you the right to say all this is my opinion, but it's essential I say it. And I will end this by quoting Thomas Paine in Common Sense as:

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason

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