Design by Traffic
A few months ago I wrote a post about a guitarist named John Petrucci. I used to have a section of my site dedicated to posting silly crap, and this fit right in. I called my post “John Petrucci: Gear”, and then forgot about it. Since then, I’ve written about many other things, all unrelated to John and his guitar shredding fury.
In looking at this site’s traffic reports, I noticed something interesting. Apparently, when people search Google for “john petrucci gear”, my site is on the front page of search results. I’m even surprisingly high in the ranks when searching for just “john petrucci”. For a moment, I thought of how easy (and ridiculous) it would be to support this new traffic. In a way, this was a strange way of the community telling me that my site is a useful resource for this guitarist, and that people find what I wrote about him useful. All I did was post a link that makes fun of him… what if I had a whole website that makes fun of him?
Today’s linking/sharing/searching community has the power to dictate importance and relevance wherever they want. If my site’s homepage design fails to display my most important content, users (and search engines) will link to what does. In some sense, the Web2.0 mindset has made the web designer even more passive. Technologies like RSS readers, webclip widgets, and Pipes can let users pull information off this site entirely, reformat it, and utilize it however they want. Sites designers can suggest importance via visual cues and architecture, but in the end, it’s the community’s decision. My ability to react to the community’s indirect suggestions becomes my most important design skill.
So will websites of the future be huge pages of collected content? How can web publishers and advertisers get people to visit their site directly if the indirect method is so much easier? Why would someone want to read my site if the RSS feed did just as good of a job? John Petrucci fans (who may have arrived at this page because of the many occurrences of his name), what do you think about all this?
February 20th, 2007 at 4:56 am
First off, I had a similar situation awhile ago. All of a sudden I started noticing people showing up at my site searching for “Tom Wolfe catchphrase 1970s” or something to that effect. Actually turned out it was a Times’ crossword puzzle question and within a couple hours not only had I gotten to the bottom of it, but I also had the answer. Crazy shit, couldn’t help me wonder whether you could just build a website where you took all the times crossword puzzle questions every day and posted them alongside a bunch of Google ads.
Onto your real question, I think increasingly it doesn’t matter where your content gets consumed as long as its consumed. There will continue to be some audience who actually visits your site, making design an important part. But if your main focus is content, who cares where they read it? I think another very important part of web 2.0 or whatever the hell else you want to call it, is the decentralization of the web in every which way. YouTube allows us to watch videos elsewhere, blogs create fan communities in every which place, RSS allows content to live elsewhere . . . Everything’s becoming unbundled.
February 20th, 2007 at 7:57 am
Noah, great comments. Much of my thoughts about this topic come from exploring sites like Bloglines, start.com, and Netvibes.com. Here, the re-bundling of content seems like it has tremendous potential. We’re moving beyond collecting individual sites, and towards collecting an entire mindset — or even a community.
If this is truly successful, these ‘collection’ sites will be less of an ultimate destination, and more of a starting point.