I’m sure we have all heard the expression “eating your own dog food”. What it refers to is building something and actually using it for yourself. An example would be everyone at Yahoo actually using Yahoo Mail instead of GMail. Think about it, how often do you use your own site?
Before we launched 9rules Notes, we often wondered why people didn’t stay on our site longer and use it and while the answers were obvious we found that we couldn’t expect people to use the site if we weren’t using it ourselves. So we began to brainstorm on how we could make the site more interactive, while still growing the brand and helping our Members in the process and because of this 9rules Notes was born.
Now the 9rules team actually uses the site every single day just like everyone else and because of this we have become more aware of what needs to be improved. Before it was easy planning a design, implementing a design and then walking away expecting everything to be grand. But once we began using the site we found that it was a completely different story.
Not that we don’t want to improve the site for our Members and users, but we want to improve it even faster because we are using it and there are things we want to see happen. Maybe that’s stupid motivation and a bit selfish, but either way, improvements help everyone out.
Think about your own site, even if it is a blog. Do you really use it besides posting an entry and maybe some followup comments? How often do we think about our designs and implement the ideas that we think are good without actually trying them out over an extended period of time? I spent the last couple of days actually using Wisdump and let me tell you, it’s not that good. Sure it’s fine if you want to read the latest entry, but beyond that it really serves no purpose.
While planning out the next design, using the current design has taught me a couple of things that I know won’t be making it into the next one and have helped me think of new ideas that probably would have never occurred if I hadn’t tried the site out myself. So if you own a site, why don’t you go about using it for the rest of the week. Followup on comments if you have them, go looking for old content and just see where the site takes you. Does the actual design make you want to tear your hair out after 15 minutes on the site?
Have a go at it, you might find that the food doesn’t taste that good.
Internets is playing a big and very important role in our lives and also providing us more affordable opportunities of the internet marketing due to the great competition in the industry and because of this web hosting packages are now also cheap then before. Even more then less hosting companies are offering you the free domain registration with their hosting packages and also providing security software packages to secure your online data. You can find lots of companies on the internet that are providing dependable and affordable VoIP service to their clients. Internet service providers ISP are mostly using the wireless internet technologies to get faster.
Originally posted on November 14, 2006 @ 2:12 pm