|
By Lauren Bielski
We're well into the Web 2.0 era, yet many companies have failed to embrace the functionality and visual pizzazz that the technology promises. But it isn't for lack of attention or investment, according to experts.
Companies can have substantial budgets for Web development, but their sites still look drab and outdated. "These projects can be really huge and time consuming," explains Greg Satell, a Kiev-based blogger and digital media consultant. "At the same time, there's no room to be wrong."
But Satell believes that organizations have to be open to iterative learning and prepared to experiment to some degree. "Some companies get locked into big planning operations that take three years to phase in," he says. "As they finally get some version of the site rolled out, the next wave of innovation has come in and the rigid, more corporate sites look behind the times."
One reason that Web 2.0 innovators like Amazon are leaving others in the dust may be the intricacy of the technology, notes Jeffrey Hammond, principal analyst for application development with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester. "Becoming an expert user with Web 2.0 tools such as Flex is a little more challenging than picking up HTML," he explains. Not every corporate team knows how to make the most of these technologies -- "It's still a process of trial and error."
Meanwhile, corporations are also seeking to incorporate social media into their Web presence. "There is no cookbook recipe on how to do any of this," said Peter Doesburg, social media strategist at Cordys, a cloud-based business process management vendor, in response to a blog entry from Satell on the role of technology disruption in social media innovation. Satell believes that many organizational structures are simply too rigid to handle bottom-up innovation on the Web.
The recession has had a dampening effect on approaches that were becoming hot among developers, designers and agencies heavily focused on interactive digital media. And aesthetic standards are rapidly changing even as technical rules are shifting underfoot.
What can we expect going forward? Last fall, Hammond and his team studied trends among 261 Web content management decision-makers. Among Forrester's key findings:
- Sixty-three percent of businesses indicated they had invested in Web content management systems to support a better customer experience. Thirty-seven percent said they were doing so to streamline the publishing process and reduce costs.
- To improve customer experience, 64 percent of businesses said they had deployed or deploy personalization functionality. Sixty-one percent planned to adopt rich Internet applications (RIA), and 52 intended to adopt RSS.
- To support their customer-facing Web sites, companies said they would pick up either an RIA framework (66 percent); JSP-Java, J2EE (50 percent); or a portal framework such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft SharePoint, BEA, Sun, or SAP (43 percent).
- Fifty-three percent indicated they would support rich media from within a WCM system, rather than via a separate digital asset management system.
Best Practices
Of all the newer Web technologies, RIA continues to gain the most ground, said Hammond, and has generated ample interest among Forrester's corporate clients. "Internal client-server applications need to be replaced," he says. "RIA makes sense in terms of cost, development time, and the capabilities it brings."
Hammond points out that a major airline recently replaced a customer-facing client-server application with a Microsoft Silverlight-styled RIA to support massive, simultaneous rebooking of flights during periods of systemic challenge such as bad weather or a flight-related emergency.
If anything, according to Doesburg of Amsterdam-based Cordys, new Web apps should have a kind of reengineering effect. "Businesses should be disruptive internally, changing the way they work and the way their organization is structured to the speed and demands of the modern customer," he wrote.
There may not be a rule book, but several general principles are emerging, including:
1. Web sites that work are authentic in tone and feature persuasive content. As the Internet gradually transitions from keywords to semantic web, "traditional" notions of optimization will undergo a shift as well. In a recent article, Colleen Jones advised that sites should "talk like a person."
2. Web sites must leverage social media effectively, particularly if lead generation is part of the agenda. Twitter, of course, looms large, but there are other forms of social media such as targeted industry communities. Social media relies on the friend of a friend (FOAF) trust model, which operates much like word of mouth.
3. Leveraging development tools effectively and appropriately is vital. "No Flash for Flash sake," says Satell -- in other words, style should not trump content or ease of use. This can also apply to tools such as Python for scripting; XPath for tree node addressing; and Velocity and XSLT for templates.
4. Sites should be designed to meet well-thought-out business objectives, which are tailored to meet key constituencies' needs. Companies need to figure out the exact agenda of their Web presence, the broad actions it wants users to take, and how best to convey that message.
Despite all the over-planning in project management, says Satell, sometimes these basic but important points get short shrift. Many companies get fixated on the "gear" or make poor compromises in communications style or design.
"Because the Web is so new, you have to just throw yourself into it," he says. "Compare it to, say, publishing, which, for all its current turmoil relies on such tactical basics as executing coverlines in a certain way for time-honored reasons. With the Web, you need to experiment from the bottom up and see what gets people to lock their attention in."
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
