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.

The Modern Web: why small businesses fail to take advantage of it

Ten years ago, having a website was quite a big deal. Helped in no small part by the dotcom bubble, websites became the essential business accessories, but the barrier to entry remained fairly high for most non-tech savvy business owners. I recall a close friend of mine paying out over £1500 for a two-page flat HTML website which, even in the late nineties, looked embarrassingly amateurish. In fact, it had been put together in Microsoft Frontpage, a piece of software which cost around £100 in those days. But there was so much mystique around the web that people were willing - if not necessarily happy - to pay high prices in order to get themselves "online".

Since then, the mystique surrounding web design has declined dramatically in the face of increased competition in the web design community, and something approaching a fair open market has emerged. A small business can now buy a bespoke website for as little as £100, and with the advent of blogs (such as Blogspot), individuals have discovered a medium for expression without the constraints of having to understand how to put a website together. Ignoring the issue of domain name paucity (thanks to the domain name trade which has emerged in recent years), nowadays getting online is both easy and very affordable.

On the face of it, this should be good news for small business owners. But in reality, the web landscape has become tougher than ever before, and knowing exactly how to tackle it has become a mystery again to most business owners I speak to. Let's examine the problems:

Increased competition in the web design field has made it harder - not easier - to choose a provider:

If you are not a tech-head, it is hard to distinguish between the thousands of web designers selling their services online. One claims to be an SEO expert while the other preaches expertise in "Ajax environments"... but without becoming deeply immersed yourself in this weird and wonderful world, it is practically impossible to tell which designer is better than the other. Choosing a provider has been reduced to an exercise in portfolio-browsing and price wars, resulting in most small businesses plumping for either: someone who is local; someone who has done websites in the same sector; or someone who is cheaper than everyone else for ostensibly the same level of quality.

Saturation of the online market has made it very difficult to get noticed:

Google, for its many qualities, has perpetuated such a myth around its search algorithms that it has ignited an entire industry: Search Engine Optimisation. In the good old days of the Dotcom Bubble, you set up a website and then spent a ludicrous amount of money on promoting it via the traditional channels of TV and press advertising. Nowadays, everybody is looking for magical ways of getting a piece of the enormous Google audience through "optimisation", which seems to have replaced traditional advertising channels for the online sector. It is possible to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on search engine optmisation, and again you are faced with an enormous swathe of providers all falling over themselves to help you get a sniff at the top ten in Google.

The problem with this new sector is transparency. A client I recently worked with was very impressed when an SEO company sent them a "keyword cloud" to highlight which keywords were prominent on their page. The SEO company did not explain where this "cloud" came from or really what it meant, but it impressed the hell out of my client, who understood very little about the whole concept. When I showed them that a keyword cloud could be produced very quickly for no money whatsoever, the impression wore off... but I only just saved the company from spending an enormous amount of money on the back of being impressed by a single piece of technical jargon. SEO is undoubtedly very important, but it has been commoditised by a sometimes exploitative industry using technical elitism to its advantage.

New phenomena such as Social Networking and Web 2.0 are entirely new and scary business models:

There is some considerable fanaticism surrounding the "new" Web today - which, loosely, revolves around the concept that content is king and everyone needs to connect and interact (Social Networking). I read an article not too long ago entitled "Free - Why $0.00 Is The Future Of Business" which sparked a lot of hysterical debate amongst the business community on sites like LinkedIn.com about how business was going to change forever (act now or miss out!!!). People are genuinely in a panic about keeping up to speed with this new economy, a panic made more acute by a general lack of understanding about how it all works.

Let's get one thing absolutely clear: economics rests fundamentally on the concept of humans transacting goods or services between themselves. This concept has not changed in thousands of years, and although technological advances have widened the channels through which we can trade, even on the internet the basic laws of economics are in full force. For example, how does Google, an entirely free service to the consumer, make money? Through selling the opportunity for advertisers to reach their huge audience. Sure, the technology is extremely advanced, but fundamentally the transaction is between human beings buying and selling a service. Nothing has changed. The same applies to Facebook, Yahoo, MySpace, and all the other consumer-facing "web 2.0" businesses.

If you think of the internet in comparison to television, you will quickly see that the principles are very similar: television holds large audiences captive through compelling content offered for free (in most cases), and businesses sell to that audience via advertising. There is a direct 21st century comparable in the rapid rise of YouTube, which has a huge captive audience due to its compelling content, but advertising is what will make it profitable.

The greatest misconception about the current wave of dotcom mania is that something extremely new and world-changing is taking place. While there have been some extremely significant and exciting technological shifts (which I have discussed in this article), what is in fact happening is that the internet has figured out how to make money, and has turned to business models that have existed for a long, long time in order to achieve that.

So, where does that leave the small business owner? Well, although the internet has settled somewhat into a more traditional playing field, with large companies dominating the userbase as well as the revenue, the thing that made the internet so extraordinary in the first place still remains: accessibility. If you open a business in Reading, you are unlikely to attract customers from Texas on a regular basis, no matter how compelling your product or service. On the internet, this is entirely possible still. But, like any potential market, you have to work in order to reach out to it, and simply putting up any old website just isn't going to do that.

People are attracted to sites like YouTube and Google because both sites do something quite basic extremely well. As a small business, it is usually unrealistic to expect to grow at anything like the pace of those two companies, but the principles on which all great websites are based should still be applied to your own. Think of your website in terms of owning a shop, and apply the principles that retailers have been using for years in order to entice people to walk in. And then, once they're in your shop, think about how you are going to entice them to actually buy.

There's a reason why supermarkets put milk and bread at the back of the shop - it is so that customers coming in for milk and bread (which are basic, repeat purchase items), will have to walk past all the other aisles bristling with tempting products in order to get to the milk and bread section. On the internet, the milk and bread equivalent is Google, which some 75% of people online use as a first point of entry into the web (many having it as their browser homepage). Things like GoogleAds are the other aisles that tempt you along the way. The principle is very similar.

As a small business owner, you need to think about your website in commercial terms and forget about the scary technical aspects. Rather than just putting a website up for the sake of it, think of it as buying retail space and how you are going to make that retail space work for you. If you were setting up a shop, would you simply buy any old unit and then sit there waiting for customers to walk in? No, you would look at ways of proactively marketing your shop and maximising on user behaviour once they have walked in. If you don't, then you are simply paying out on a pointless overhead and leaving the rest to chance.

On the web, you need to find your market as well as helping it find you. SEO helps with the latter, but the former requires a marketing strategy all on its own. This may seem daunting, but the rewards are potentially huge. Don't let your website remain an overhead.