What is the purpose of your site?

Here's one of those 'less talk, more listen' posts. You don't get many from me! I want to know a bit about your websites and your approach and attitude towards their purpose. Is your site(s) designed to make money, inform and educate,publicise a product/service/person or is the purpose unclear - perhaps it's just for fun. For each case, how do you achieve your goals?

Design and Usability

How does your site design contribute to the end goal? With regards to user experience, what do you feel takes priority - enabling visitors to get to where they need to be as quickly as possible, or to provide an enjoyable experience. Or both? And how do you go about achieving this? How much do you feel design contributes towards the overall user experience? Would you prefer a site that is easy to navigate and view, with well written copy and clear structure but features a minimal or unattractive design? Or would you rather a beautiful looking site with fancy dynamic functionality and gimmicks, but 'makes you think' a more? What about a balance of the two. How do you feel you can work to create a website that is fantastically well structured and presented, whilst revealing some tasty eye-candy?

Measuring success

How do you measure your site's success? What do you determine to be 'success'? Site traffic? Perhaps a deeper look at your site's analytis; what do you feel takes precedence? Length of visit, repeat visits,countires visited from, pure volume of traffic? How do these statistics vary depending on your site's purpose? Perhaps you feel the best measure of your site's success is more organic than statistical - the comments you receive, RSS or email subscribers, contact form feedback or a combination of the lot. What do you feel is more important; your visitors experience or the site stats and revenue made?

I want your opinions

Please take the time out to comment below. This post isn't about me or Redswish, I want to know what other people think. Get your site URL in there to get some coverage. I'll be summing up everyone's responses in an article in a few weeks.

Post from http://www.redswish.co.uk