Adaptive Web Strategy: Moving from "How" to "What" and "Why"
Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 10:24AM Dave Peterson, ND&P Interactive Marketing Manager, discusses the Internet, its evolution and related website strategy.
The Game
Many years ago when we started building this concoction of servers, code and digital media we were pioneers and inventors of what would become the Internet. Websites took shape, best and worst practices were cycled through, and today we have an infrastructure of business and personal sites that have become societies unto themselves.*
Evolution
We’ve had to solve many problems over these years. What browsers should we use - what should they do? What code to write, what format to put media into, should we use extensions? For the most part we’ve solved most of this. For good or bad, the browser wars have settled down - sure we have fan favorites but the huge chasms that were once there have closed. Code methodologies have settled into a few camps and we’re seeing fewer massive shifts in how websites are built.
Media formatting and video codec problems are mostly in the past (i.e. YouTube and Vimeo have essentially solved online video for most). And while it was a painful and humbling process we may have seen the death blow to browser extensions (looking at you Flash/Silverlight).
The Rules
So have we solved the web? No, we've just figured out the rules of the game. The solutions that have come are huge, but I’d consider most of these akin to the getting the rules of baseball down on paper - who will play well from here on out and how they will do so is still left to be figured out. We used to have a saying plastered around our office in the 90s [yes, I was doing this in the 90s... but I was so very young then ;) ]
- “E-Business is still business” I don’t think we borrowed that from anyone but I’m also not vain enough to think it’s original. What we were going for then was a reminder that no matter how cool and wonderful being on the bleeding edge of technology was we still had to solve business problems or our work was irrelevant. So while we’ve solved many technical and procedural problems of how to get things done, I believe we are still young as an industry on what to get done.
Too often we see project teams place the emphasis of their concerns on those how’s while forgetting what and why. When I’m called into a project creation or review meeting one of my main concerns is to determine “do we know why this project is happening?” followed quickly by “what problem does this project solve?” If we cannot quickly come to an answer my warning sirens go off because I know that these questions will be asked six months/a year later when there seems to be no measurable fruit for all of the effort.
The Perfect Team
What we've come to understand, is that in addition to our work as advertisers/marketers we've had to blend in skill sets that typically have been isolated in other industries. We did this with technology several years ago but new/refined disciplines like Information Architecture and Experience Design have moved past being catch phrases in meetings to expected capabilities. Add to this the evolution beyond traditional SEO to Search Marketing and Content Strategy, as well as a radical shift in traffic analytics, and we’re reminded daily that we’ve far from figured out this game.
Play Ball
So what’s next? Take an adaptive posture to web solutions; don't be afraid to ask questions about your project. Ask more of us; ask more of your team. I cringe as I type this but, like baseball, don’t get comfortable with easy answers; the stats and tactics you used last year might be weaker or meaningless now. This isn't to propagate a negative or cynical disposition but to acknowledge that, like in baseball, what worked before may not give you the results you expect now.
Like there will never be another 1927 New York Yankees, there will never be a perfect website. Key variables like budgets, time constraints, availability of project leads, and what your competitors are doing will consistently force you to prioritize your efforts. ND&P has an audit sheet of what makes a great website and while that criterion changes every year, what doesn't change is that we have to choose what a particular site will be good at. Taking assessment of your goals and those key variables will help you determine how to structure or restructure your efforts - giving you a better shot at a competitive "season."
*Google reaches over 50% of the global Internet population, and Facebook 45% with an average time on site of 23 minutes a day. Twitter is consistently in the top ten of visited sites in the world - 8th in the U.S. Pinterest, essentially non-existent six months ago, has rocketed into the top 20 and is trending to capture 3% of the global audience with an average time on site of 9 minutes. (Note: All data pulled from Alexa.com)
(Dave Peterson)
