Joining the Web 2.0 Bandwagon - Designing For Web 2.0
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In the late nineties, PHP (preprocessor hypertext) caught on with web designers, and websites were built using PHP to parse files and to correspond between web browsers and databases (database driven sites). Suddenly it was easier for designers to build custom scripts without resorting to "serious" programming.
This was also when web 2.0 began, and really it was the web 2.0 companies (like Amazon, Google, Napster) that survived when the Internet bubble burst. Web 2.0 introduced the concept of user-generated content, with Amazon allowing users to write reviews of their favorite books, Google incorporating PageRank which is simply whether other sites consider your own site important enough to link to, and Napster doing peer to peer downloads. The more users each site actually had, the more important the sites became (which is the whole point of web 2.0). These websites were predominantly database-driven "dynamic" sites, which generated constantly changing data and pages.
No longer was a website built by one person, maintained by one person and viewed only by typing a URL into the address bar. Search engines crawled pages, indexed them and put the information on their databases. Now searchers could type in key words and get content listing URLs and some meta data. Directories listed URLs after sorting them into categories and placed profiles next to them. Designers began to design "search engine friendly sites" and now, designers have started building "blog friendly sites."
The most important thing designers should note when designing for a situation where the content on the site may be viewed away from the site it is generated from is that the "aesthetics" of the site are actually not as important as they used to be. It is no longer about just how "cool looking" your site is, though that is good -- suddenly it is about how to get information to the highest number of locations as soon as it comes out.
This is especially true with all of the blogs that publish content regularly and feed hundreds of subscribers with data about data, or "meta data." It means that a user could arrive at any page on your site, because bloggers don't link to your home page, but rather the content they're writing about. Still, while blogs are important because of search engines, the bookmarking sites actually take the content to where the eye balls are.
Blog Powered
Google uses link structure as an important factor in ranking pages. Bloggers are ubiquitous (and also really fast at updating for new content) in linking to sites, which makes blogs one of the most crawled sectors on the web. Bloggers however seem to respect only content (or killer apps). Some sites I consider to be purely "blogs;" these output RSS from various sites and also provide reviews and links back to the content.
Designing for blogging may require an RSS feed (taken for granted really). Getting your users to link back to your sites from their blogs will be an excellent linking strategy (and will keep you from having to do it yourself).
Blogging provides user-generated links back to your site. This is fast becoming a surefire way of getting a huge number of links, and thus improve one's ranking in the search engines. You do not have to be a content provider to attract content (and hence attract bloggers), but you do have to channel it, by gathering content and bringing it to your site via RSS feeds. The search engines notice the activity on your site (it gets new content every time your content providers get new content) and activity always improves rankings. Also your users notice that they get more relevant resources on your site; hence they blog about it and output your own RSS on their sites. For businesses that are not content publishers this is a good way of getting users to actually "advertise" for you via blogging on their own sites, and also improve your linking structure.
Next: From Aesthetics to Information Architecture >>
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