Joining the Web 2.0 Bandwagon - From Aesthetics to Information Architecture
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Websites used to be all about structure and styling, using HTML for table structures and CSS for styling (and later structure with DIV tags). Now the most important thing about websites is actually how the content is arranged. This has being shown by how important search engines have become, and how websites have started designing around search engines (that is what SEO is all about, after all). Now websites actually have to design with the concept that some users will also distribute their content for them.
Tagging
Tagging, unlike blogging, actually increases hits, as the book marking sites are slowly becoming quick changing databases. Apart from that tags can be overlapping depending on the user. It is no longer a bot which reads your key words and categorizes your pages in a database; now users read your content and tag it as they like, meaning different users can tag this article differently. for example, one can tag it "Internet marketing," another will tag it "design," and for all I know, some may tag it "balderdash."
Social bookmarking brings your web site URL into communities, and can actually generate a large number of hits straight from the bookmarking site. For example, there was a URL on Digg that got 1658 visits in 16 hours; that is a lot of hits in 16 hours!
You can encourage tagging by "inviting" your users to tag the site. Take a look at the SEO Chat page and you'll see that it links to Digg, Simply, Furl, del.icio.us with a specific call to action. Note that not all of your users will be engaged in advertising for you; not all will add your link to their blogs, even if they think your content is compelling (most will read it and roll over). The numbers that will actually tag your site may be a very low percentage (think less than one percent), but once it gets into that community, the eyes have it.
Semantic Markup, Dynamic sites
Approaching closely are new web standards, as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) aims at standardizing websites for XHTML, but even this will not be adequate to describe content accurately. XML formats such as RSS help in syndicating (distributing) content, but for the content to be more adequately described, languages such as OWL and RDF are harbingers of an approaching change in the way future websites will be built and described to search engines and other automated database compilers.
Designers will have to become more like programmers (apart from also becoming better Internet marketers) in order to not only adequately describe data, but also to track user behavior and to move constantly changing data around. As one analyst over at Lagos-based software development company Blue Interface remarked, "Brochure-based sites may as well be dead."
Web services allow anyone to build an interface to content on any domain if there is a web services API (Application Program Interface) provided by the developers on that domain.
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