How the Web has changed and what it means for business: part 1

"Websites look different these days," a client said to me a few weeks ago. He was the Sales Director of a medium-sized company, in his early forties, who had been using the internet for about 10 years. I asked him what he thought was different. "I can't put my finger on it," he said. "They just look cleaner somehow". It developed into an interesting discussion around the technological and design shifts that have influenced the web in recent years. To a web designer, who follows trends and has to think about modern design and technology at both the macro and micro level, most of these things are obvious. But when dealing with business owners, their observations of web trends are limited where they can't see the correlation to bottom line growth. What does a Sales Director care about the size of the font on his company's website, when he's got the Managing Director breathing down his neck to deliver results?

I sometimes feel that web designers don't make enough effort to understand the viewpoint of business owners, and consequently get frustrated when their clients are dismissive of the beautiful designs they put together for them. Brian Armstrong discusses this communications gap in an excellent article on Smashing Magazine. In this series of articles I will be expanding on that topic and discussing some of the key trends that have impacted the web recently, and more importantly, what they mean in commercial terms. I will be using "real world" examples to show how many of the modern web trends are directly comparable to other trends outside the web, and by doing so highlight the fundamental commercial principles underpinning the suggestions your web designer is making...

Key trend 1: the proliferation of broadband

Back in the late 90s, most people were still reliant on dial-up connections to get online. If you were in the UK at the time, broadband was a very expensive pipedream, and you were most likely using a 56.6k modem and connecting via a service provider such as AOL. Not only that, but most dial-up connections were to a local phone number which effectively meant your time online was charged by the minute. With that in mind, consider Yahoo's front page, such as it was in this snapshot, from February 1998:



Yahoo was famous at the time for having one of the smallest web designs in terms of filesize - around 10kb in total, which meant that it took less than 2 seconds to download on a 56.6k connection. As is still the case today, one of the key behaviours of web users was intolerance of slow page loading. The commercial imperative was to ensure that the important stuff was presented in the simplest, quickest way possible, and anything graphical was minimised to reduce download time. In Yahoo's case, the actual content was presented in the form of basic text links displayed in the default format, meaning that they would display in exactly the same way no matter what browser you were using or how fast your modem was.

Now, consider Yahoo today:



You will instantly notice that the new Yahoo is much more visually interesting, and uses graphics extensively. The page is certainly a lot bigger in terms of filesize, but now that broadband is the standard for internet connections, download speed is almost a non-issue. To put some perspective on how much things have progressed, the BT Broadband standard package connects you at speeds of up to 8mb per second, which is more than 140 times faster than your 56.6k connection of 1998. And it's getting faster - the world's fastest residential connection is currently 40gb, which is more than 700,000 times faster than the 56.6k connection of 1998!

We have seen this type of progression many times before, and like most trends on the internet, there is a comparable in the offline world. I liken this particular trend to the development of newspaper printing. Consider the visual presentation of the News of the World paper over the years:



The version on the left is from October 1843, on the right is from March 2007. The change is directly comparable to the Yahoo transition, with the early newspaper featuring minimal graphic input on the top, and squeezing as much text into as small a space as possible to save on printing costs (which is broadly equivalent to download speed). This might seem like an extreme example given the huge time gap and current market positioning of the News of the World as a tabloid, but even the more "serious" broadsheets have witnessed this shift, such as the Daily Telegraph:



The paper on the left is from October 1877, on the right is February 2007. While the text is still denser in the modern version than the News of the World, this is more a function of the newspaper's intellectual pitch rather than design constraints. The use of colour and contrast to lead the reader's eye is still very prominent, but the most significant overall change that most newspapers exhibit is a transition to impactful design. Like the web, this is achieved via the use of larger, bolder content blocks and more extensive use of pictures.

Alongside the expansion of broadband, the expansion of people's computer screens has also played a significant part in web design. The average home computer is packaged with a 19 inch screen nowadays, compared to 14 inches in the 1990s. Screen size has a direct impact on resolution (i.e. the number of pixels you can show on-screen at any one time which, like with digital cameras, is a case of the more the better), and web design has to cater to the lowest common denominator on this issue. In the 1990s, the average lowest resolution was 640 x 480, meaning that websites were quite narrow in order to fit onto the screen. Nowadays, the average lowest resolution is 1024 x 968, so websites have become wider as a result. This offers more space for large images and, generally, a greater canvas on which to create an impact.

What does all this mean from a business point of view? There are two things you have to consider. Firstly, the expectations of the online customer; in other words, if your competitors' pages look more impactful than yours, they are more likely to attract and convert prospective customers into sales purely by comparative perception. Unfair though it may seem, unless the prospective customer has heard of your business, they will make assumptions on you based on how your site looks in relation to your competitors, so it pays to keep up with current design trends if only to stay in the race.

Secondly, the conversion benefits of impactful design itself. Impactful design, in this sense, does not necessarily mean beautiful visuals, but rather a layout that will draw the potential customer in and then lead them progressively towards your desired action point (purchase, phonecall, etc). It is the same principle that retailers use to draw people into their shop (window displays), and lead them towards a sale (shop floor layout). In the newspaper examples above, both feature a large photograph of a celebrity on the front to catch the eye, with bold, instantly noticeable headlines marking out the significant stories. Similarly, the modern, broadband-enabled web offers you the freedom to highlight your own key products and services using eye-catching images and bold design to draw the prospective customer in. This has informed much of the recent shift in design on the web. See how HMV has evolved to use graphics extensively to promote its key products:



And the same principles can be applied to the B2B sector; take Ernst & Young's website as an example:



Beyond design, the advent of broadband as the default setup for internet connections has also signalled the birth of the web as a genuine platform for commerce. It has significantly broadened the online userbase through being able to provide more compelling content such as video streaming (YouTube), social networking (Facebook), blogs and so on. Broadband also means that people can be permanently connected to the internet without having to worry about booting up a piece of software like AOL, or worrying about per-minute charges. As a result, the web has become more deeply entwined in the general environment of the average consumer, and will become increasingly more so as the mobile phone industry continues to make huge advances in handheld web browsing technology.

The end result of all this is simple: you have just as much chance of reaching your customer via the web as you do via traditional methods, and in more and more cases you probably have a greater chance of reaching certain markets. And with increased freedom in design capabilities you have a greater chance of converting those customers once they find your online home.

In the next part of this series I will be examining the not insignificant phenomenon of social networking, and will show that, again, there are comparables in the offline world that we can learn from.