‘There is suffering in this world. Suffering has a cause. The cause is desire. One can overcome suffering by killing desires.’ It is high time that the web property owners followed this Buddhist teaching. Some of them want to eat more than they can swallow.

Well, it is in their interest to cut on making demands that make no sense. Either they should desire more features or wish for more profits. And, even Lord Buddha would not mind going for the second desire.

Overloading your site with features that it can do without is an unintelligent thing to do. For one, it burdens your expenditure on website maintenance. Resources, most importantly time, that can be utilized for enhancing the efficiency of the necessary features, get wasted in building useless enhancements. It is important to understand that the website should, first of all, cater to the needs of the users. Features should facilitate the users to do what they want from the website. But, if an entrepreneur puts his vision ahead of those who consume his services, he is suffering from ‘vision overload’. And, he has to pay for that.

The Point, a startup based in Chicago, faced similar problems till they shifted to the KISS model – “Keep It Simple, Stupid!” which lays down that simplicity is the key to success. They drew a line between ambition and practicality which made it easy to point out the features that were essential to the site and others that could be dropped.

Sticking to basics has been fruitful, always. If it is just a forum for discussion that the users need to carry out their regular activity, imposing fancy tools such as a Super Wall (inspired from Facebook), chat rooms, communities, Q&A etc. is insulting their demands.

Cost overheads and delayed launch are a few of the many demerits that an organization can embrace if it tries to be smarter.

I will conclude by quoting Andrew Mason (the founder of The Point), “Users care about whether you are meeting their needs, not the vision of your company. Save your vision for your investors”.