How’s Your Spaghetti?

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I love trying new restaurants. Thankfully my husband and sons also enjoy it, so one day we might be at the little rinky-dink eat-outside place watching traffic go by and another evening might find us enjoying an excellent steak to the mellow sounds of a waltz.

I learned quite a while back, that you can get a good idea of how a restaurant is by trying one of the staples for that type of restaurant. So at a new seafood restaurant, I order the clam chowder. At an Italian restaurant it is a question of how good their bread is (and if it’s real Italian bread) and how their spaghetti is.

Photo courtesy of Rick Dikeman
Almost without fail, I’ve found that if a restaurant doesn’t do well on the basic items, they probably aren’t going to excel at the other items either.

In any business, staples are the mainstay. They are the things that people are going to look for over and over…and what will keep people coming back to you. If you do well at those, you will have fans. Fail, and people will leave to find someone who understands the basics.

Twitter is having a hard time with this right now. Lately it seems that it’s up almost as often as it’s down. Almost.

Even when it’s up, it’s having problems. Last weekend, for example, clicking on the ‘Older’ tab at the bottom of the page took you to the top of the page. You had to manually add “/home?page=2″ (or whatever page) to see the older entries.

For two days, I had a direct message I couldn’t get to. Every time I’d try to check, Twitter would error out.

And people are noticing. Other communication sites are gaining followers as people decide reluctantly that Twitter doesn’t have the basics down anymore.

Big companies make great examples. It’s easy to point to one and say, “See, here’s what they’re doing wrong.”

But it’s not just big companies who need to pay attention to their staples. Even the smallest blogger needs to know what people expect from their site…and make sure that above everything else, each visitor receives that.

So what do you look for when you visit SU Comments? And for your own blog, what are your staples? Are you meeting your visitors’ basic expectations?