This article is a review of the website InSing.com,
When I open up my mobile phone, I see my service provider – SingTel. They have been a reliable service provider for my mobile phone as I am using their Broadband on Mobile plan, and some mobile phone plan for my calling usage. I have with them for years.
Today, I get to see SingTel having a subsidiary to start a new website business called InSing.com.
My first impression
My first impression is that it is a one-stop service for everybody, where we can do our shopping, looking for food and drinks, checking for news, looking for entertainment, and even to look for business. Sorry if I got any of the value-added services wrong, because it simply tries to cramp everything together. It looks like one of the dot com business plans found in 1997 during the Internet bubble burst.
Let’s have a quick look at their sitemap. They are basically trying to cover anything and everything on earth! From news in Singapore, to Asia and Europe, talking about sports, health, lifestyle, entertainment, business, and any others. From food in restaurants, to streets and pubs. From music to celebrity gossip and asian entertainment. From shopping in fashion, home & hobbies to electronics and gadgets. From events to performing arts, body & wellness and reading. They even have business and service finder.
Looks like a magazine with many faces
Seriously speaking, this website is very likely trying to behave like a magazine of many themes. Is this a lifestyle magazine? Or it’s a food magazine?
Taking a good look at their about us page, this website is aiming to educate the visitors to be in the know of everything that is happening in Singapore with them. It means that they will go out there to scout for all sorts of information for you to know. That means they have a lot of work to do to keep this online magazine busy. I really wonder how many people they have in the team to work on this gigantic ambitious project… and whether their online banner ad spaces are going to help them to break even or not.
Having a website with many different types of information, you will not attract very highly targeted traffic. Most likely not for people to come back again for more… And I have a strong feeling that the team behind is quite new to the web business industry.
The web interface
This reminds me of this picture below.
Every “unique” content is trying to catch the attention of the visitors by being in the red color! However, it turns out that there is only one outstanding color here!
The contents on the main landing page is so crowded with unique contents that I really don’t know where to click to begin with! Everybody is trying to be unique here! My thought is that there should only have one outstanding content, as too many outstanding contents will end up like the above picture with too many red balls. Especially when the contents are attracting very different markets.
There is simply an overflow of information on the main landing page. (Another example, take a good look at www.google.com and www.yahoo.com. I would prefer to see only 1 search bar, than to see so many other disturbing unique contents!)
Untargeted traffic for the web
I have a strong feeling that this website’s incoming traffic has to be sustained by the expensive offline advertisements which are highly untargeted and not-so-effective. After a spike on the traffic with expensive offline advertisments, the next step that InSing should do is to work on the retention of the first-time visitors to come back for more. But I have a strong feeling that they are using the traditional method of giving discounts and promotions to sustain them, instead of focusing on their contents.
Missing Web 2.0 tools
I can only see 5-star rating tool. Where have the rest gone to? Things such as digg, delicious, stumbleupon, facebook, twitter, blog and RSS are really important in retaining visitors. They will help a lot in the attraction of new visitors from around the world, and will also allow enthusiasts to subscribe to the RSS feeds for consistent information without having to ask them back.
Our website today is not about asking them to come back or not. The focus should be to build a list of targeted community whom we can always market to them with contents, products and services!
Conclusion
Not that this website will fail or not, it really needs a little fine-tuning on the web contents and its traffic generation strategy. On the web, content is king. Content is the one that is going to convert the visitors into returning visitors. On the web, all of us have been bombarded with overloading information. How many of us will really bother to go back for more information except when we need them? The focus of streetdirectory.com is more of a demand basis, which is essential for our personal and work purpose. The focus of facebook.com is more of an entertainment, a soon-to-replace-email-usage-between-friends place that we will just go back to look for new messages every time we are online.
One suggestion is to categorise them into different sub-domains to focus on different niches. A good example will be HowStuffWorks where they attempt to teach how stuff works in almost anything and everything!
Good luck! I will be really interested to find out how this project will evolve…
Photo credit: dvgphoto
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