Posted By Frozen DNN on 31 Aug 2009 03:54 PM
http://smallbusinessanswers.yahoo.com/overrated
7. Traffic-Driven Web Sites. Everybody has witnessed the success of social-networking sites like Facebook and popular blogs that generate all their revenue off advertising. But as the Internet ages, that's much harder to accomplish, says Martin Zwilling, a start-up consultant in Fountain Hills, Ariz., who specializes in helping entrepreneurs find angel investors.
Zwilling says he hears pitches for new social-networking sites about once a week, but actively deters people from starting them. "I say, skip it," he says. "You need to invest $50 million to get any presence" in the social-networking space right now and it's very difficult to get people to leave established sites. What's more, he says, the amount of traffic needed to build a lucrative traffic-driven Web site is far more than most new Web entrepreneurs realize: "Until you get to the point where you have a million page views a day, you're nowhere."
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I am experiencing this one. My website is slower than a snail. I have no idea how to market it without spending lot of money, which I don't have. Anyone else experiencing this? How can we become different than the other Social Networking websites? Any ideas?
Hi Frozen, I can relate and I think what Mr Zwilling says is mostly true for most individuals and businesses, but there is a good reason he is a consultant and not the prez of a highly successful start up, know what I mean?
For your site speed, I have a few suggestions based on our experience.
1) in our early days with dnn the sites would stall alot, turns out the problem was a flaw in .net, one day we did an upgrade and it was gone, server was much more responsive.
2) I can only speak for us based on our setup, but using pageblaster had, at times, detrimental effects on performance. We tried it several times under different conditions, bottom line is performance on dnn can be quite good and is easily good enough without pageblaster.
3) Shared hosting presents problems not worth dealing with, even if you cannot afford or justify a large server go for a small dedicated machine at godaddy or similar. I have never used SQL express on a production machine, there are memory limitations but I would think it might be ok running a single site. You an go with workgroup for pretty cheap and I think that is 3gb memory limit which is easily enough for most dnn sites. Also, sql 2008 has a new web edition with zero memory limits for cheap (25$ a month at theplanet.com per processor).
4) Use minimum amount of third party vendors as possible and be careful who you get in bed with in this area, minimum number of installed modules possible, and always use mods with source. A few exceptions for apps like AS where the benefit outweights the cost of having to rely on a vendor for basically everything.
5) of course make sure you have the performance settings set correctly in host settings
6) Use good components, ditch the solpart menu and replace with either links or implement a menu based on the snapsis css menu. Most of the sites at snow that do not use telerik rad controls, which are not lightweight.
7) Newer versions of dnn are smaller, I have had our current dev site down to around 300kb and that is with a full menu and some page content, javascript/ajax files are smaller. Cut down your skin files, stylesheets etc. Still, alot of this is cached so it will not make huge difference other than on first visit. However, first impressions are important and many, many people will click away if your site is taking time to load. I do.
8) Probably the biggest complaint is the time it sometimes takes to load when no one has been surfing on the site. The app has unloaded from memory and is being loaded into memory before rendering your page, this goes away after your site is regularly visited since it does not unload memory. You can implement a keep alive, if your site is not regularly visited at least every couple minutes you should do more research on it and implement some sort of keep alive system.