Did UrbanBaby redesign itself out of relevance?
The new dead-tree edition of Wired describes how CNET bought and then killed parents community site UrbanBaby. How’d they do it? By redesigning. (Sorry, the article isn’t available online yet.)
Of all sites, community sites bear the greatest risk of redesign failure. When you change the flow of conversation, you change the site’s raison d’etre.
According to the article, after CNET redesigned UrbanBaby, users revolted, and two of them created a site that essentially cloned the earlier version. That site now gets 3x the traffic of UrbanBaby.
So this begs a question? Why hasn’t anybody developed a better Craigslist? It still looks like the kind of site you’d pop up on a Mosaic browser in ’95. It’s success is partially due the power of its brand and user network. But mostly it’s because Craig has steadfastly avoided f***ing the site up.
March 25th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
[...] usually true. But sometimes sites redesign themselves out of relevance. (See UrbanBaby for a recent [...]