Websites : The Evolution

If you've heard the term Web 2.0 you've probably also heard all the conjecture about what is and isn't Web 2.0. Our interpretation is that Web 2.0 defines a new phase of a user centric web with innovation in native web applications. Regardless of terminology there is a definite shift in the innovations that are taking place on the web. This shift is taking the web:

• From content centric to user centric models…
• From the web as a virtual space for storing information to the web as a platform for services…
• From program based innovation to web based innovation.

From Content Centric to User centric models

Websites started out as (and predominantly remain) content centric. Organisations often jumped into their web initiatives with intentions of meeting customer needs but with little understanding of how to do this. Often businesses fell back on the web being a store of information and adding their own store of content to the web which, like the universe, kept on expanding. Portal sites provided a useful business model to deliver useful information to particular industries and subgroups albeit with little interaction.

Our means of controlling this information was through search engines of which we saw many: MSN, Yahoo, Dmoz, Alta Vista, Excite, Looksmart all of which seemed much like each other with no real market leader.

One search engine experiment was a human edited directory by Dmoz called the Open Directory Project. They created a voluntary community of content experts to review websites and determine the categories to which websites belonged.  But the web was never meant to be slowed down by such human processes. Other search engines created webbots to crawl the webspace basically trawling pages to sift through the content and determine what the site was about;

Then along came Google with a new way of looking at web content. In hindsight it is the smartest way of looking at the web. That is: an interconnected world of websites! Google came up with the PageRank system that looked at the relevance of sites by using many elements including:

• semantic indexing (or looking at related words on a website), 
• inbound as well a outbound links (who’s linking to you and who are you linking to?), and 
• the page rank of sites in your neighbourhood (how relevant are the sites linking to you and how does that impact your page rank). 

Google search has had a huge impact on both website space (aesthetically and programmatically). Now that search results are so useful to users, the need to become more visible brought about the new science of Search Engine Optimisation.

From the web as a virtual space for storing information to the web as a platform for services

In the early years, in website design and development, we talked about the stickyness of websites. Holding people within your virtual space for as long as possible. Attempts to create interactive experiences involved flash animated sites to deliver some 'wow!' factor and make the experience memorable if not completely engaging.  People watched fancy introductions that eventually came with a standard 'skip intro' link to take you directly to the site. That very standard was a clear indication by users for more engaging content and experiences than impressive graphics and slick presentations.

Minimal interaction creates a passive experience. Although some recent developments have been more successful in implementing an interactive experience and some success can be seen with ebay and Amazon

Websites were seen as virtual real estate with shopfronts in cyberspace. This made it easy to take our existing models of operation and place them over the web.

Advertising was going to make us all billionnaires. The dot com age was largely built around the business model of large portals that brought many eyeballs connected to brains that made purchasing decisions. The advertising model was largely lifted off other passive mediums – television and print. We saw big flashy advertisements, popups, pop-unders and so forth. But clicking and closing ads on the web was even easier  than flicking the channel on the remote.

In the early years web advertising gave more power to advertisers and the result was a compromised user experience.  The over application of advertising created so much noise that the content was getting crowded. Advertising did much to hinder the usability of the web.

While the web continued to be places where users were talked to, advertised at, but basically ignored, email became a powerful means for user power. Viral campaigns were popular and developed an air of being in the know. At first it was jokes and chain letters but then came the attachments with ads and other clever means of demonstrating the power of word-of-mouth.

Other emerging technology is challenging the traditional website design. People are not only viewing the web using a PC or Mac but they are also using hand held devices. The cleaner the development is, the more likely that your website can be seen on the various mediums. Also for consideration is that sites are no longer only viewed at a desk at work or at home, they are being viewed in the car, in the park, at a bar over drinks, on the ferry, bus, train or plane. 

The tendency to want to engage users through a slick presentation of a website can sometimes be your worst enemy when considering the multitude of devices now able to access the web.

From program based innovation to web based innovation

Early in the web industry, the big players came from software worlds and we saw innovation largely in email programs, web browser technology, portable document file creation all of which provided aids and supports to working on the web but innovation within the webspace was light on.  Players like Netscape, Microsoft, Adobe all provided program based applications that set up the infrastructure for the web. Web developers in the meantime lobbied, pushed, discussed but mostly waited for these players to deliver a more stable platform that would allow for more innovation.

So the evolution of the web since the dot com boom has been an ever expanding space of content used for promotion and research.  Let's look at some of the issues and challenges that have come out of this evolution.