WEB 2.0 AND its CHARACTERISTICS

Web 2.0 sites are usually informal and distinctly un-Corporate in their tone. They load fast, and don’t waste user time on gratuitous gimmickry. Wherever possible, visitors are not taken away from the page they are on, but can access layers of detail, which loads within the page, using programming techniques such as Ajax.

Often, these sites make extensive use of mash-ups, in which content from different sites is pulled in and ‘mashed’ together. For example, they might overlay Google Earth images with a tool for labelling points of interest, which in turn may have a discussion forum or a photo upload tool merged into it.

Despite their desire to be unique, all of these new ebusinesses have adopted a similar look and style, which has almost become a cliché. Traditional marketers who have not yet joined the customer-centric revolution, but are smart enough to know that packaging is a vital part of perception, are cosmetically updating their sites so that at least on the surface, they appear to be current. It is this tendency that causes some people to mistakenly dismiss web 2.0 as merely another gimmick.

In the same way as hairstyles and book covers, websites go through fashion phases. The look of a website conveys as much about the site to a first-time visitor as your choice of clothing or the car you drive conveys about you to a total stranger Based on appearances, people rapidly come to conclusions about whether or not they are interested in finding out more. A site built 3 years ago looks like it is 10 years out of date, and the immediate presumption is that its content is not current or the company behind it is out of touch. Online, those judgments are made in a fraction of a second.

The sites of the web 2.0 businesses of 2009 are all pretty much alike. At the core is simplicity, with no crowding on the page and a great deal of white space. By comparison, the websites of 2003 look like pages torn from a phone book. Current sites all use a central layout, not the left-aligned look of years gone by.

They also frequently make use of only one or two columns. Their navigation is bold and simple, and often eschews the old-fashioned categories of about/products/services in favour of customer-centric tabs such as play/live/eat. Gone are the little horizontal bars, squeezed in at the top of the page, which contained logos and other office-era letterhead emulations. Instead, large loud mastheads proliferate, using strong colours, typically with some kind of rich texture or graduation in them. Cons are fun and young, not corporate and dull, and they are always designed to have intuitive meanings.

The pervasive trademark of a 2008 site with web 2.0 leanings was the illusion of shiny, reflective surfaces. For some examples of early web 2.0 sites, go to iambo.net, Gather, Podzinger, iotSpot, Writely, Yedda, Trulia, 9Rules, 3lSignals, Linkedln, Twitter and CafePress.

The look in 2009, though it has much in common with earlier sites, has shifted to a more architected style. Earlier sites all used a similar palette of colours — avocado greens, light blues, oranges and grays.

This palette has shifted to pinks, earthier greens, charcoals, cyan and beige. Page areas that appear to be reflective, typically making text look like it is standing on a glass surface, are disappearing, giving way to a look that has a distressed, grungy, hand-crafted appearance. Layouts now have a substantial link-laden footer, commonly occupying the lower third of the page. Navigation has become a lot more complex, allowing you to get to about any significant page without needing to go through a series of intermediate pages.

Moreover, large panoramic photos and streaming video are now commonplace. This will, doubtless, yield to another design trend within a year or less.

One of the best examples of the power and simplicity of web 2.0 is Last.fm, an online radio station that plays a personalized selection of music. Last.fm epitomizes the benefits of sharing. You simply enter a list of the artists whose music you like, and the site will play you your kind of music all day. It looks at the music that other members who share your preferences want to listen to, and lets you discover new performers who were not on your list. You can allocate a score to anything that is playing, and the system updates your music programming accordingly.

Web 2.0 businesses are springing up to target all kinds of niche interest groups. InnoCentive is a social network for scientists, designed to match researchers to projects around the world.

Linkedln targets business professionals who seek to make connections with others in their field. A site named Eventful allows anyone to list, and comment about, any kind of event from a church picnic or school football game, to a global convention of dental technicians.

These are all new business ideas, built around the sharing of knowledge. But how do big-brand marketers in established business sectors interpret and invoke web 2.0.

Amazon.com has a site dedicated exclusively to handbags and shoes. It is called Endless. The idea is that they carry pretty much every make and model of footwear and handbag.

The site uses the wide open spaces and gorgeous big images that today’s web makes possible. Despite is vast catalogue, you can find anything easily, because the system allows you to search according to all kinds of criteria: you can find a pair of shoes by size, colour, brand, fabric, gender, age, style or price.

In a world-first, you can even search for shoes by heel height. Once you have short-listed your options, which appear in an easy-to-read custom catalogue, you can pass a virtual magnifying glass over each shoe and spin it around in 360 degrees, all instantly1 without waiting for downloads and without being sent to a new page.

The international clothing retailer Gap updated its ecommerce site to not only look mere modern (shades of orange and grey, with loads of white space), but to provide a much more usable service to its customers.

With older sites you need to cave the page that you are on in order to see what is in your shopping cart— and finding your way back again is never easy. On Gap’s site, there is an in-line shopping hag, and its content opens up within the page that you are on. You can hover over any item to see its photos and details, and to make changes.

If the black skirt doesn’t work with the other items you subsequently selected, you can exchange it for another colour from within the shopping bag. And you can check out from within the bag at any time, with One click On the site, you can leave comments or reviews in context against any item, and see the comments others have left.

Finally, so that you don’t have to search around the site to see what is new, you can subscribe to changes in the catalogue by P55 (technically standing for rich site summary, but more commonly referred to as really simple syndication) teed. this means that any time a new item is listed or a price changes, you are notified, and, if you are interested, you simply click on the ink to be taken directly to the relevant item.

A year later, Gap’s parent company updated the site again, and, in a fairly controversial strategic move, made the site a portal that houses the sites of their other clothing retail brands Banana Republic Old Navy and Piperline. Brand purists find this hard to accept iy would you risk undermining a high-end brand like Banana Republic by associating it so intimately with a low-end brand like Old Navy? Perhaps if you view it through the eyes of the customer’s processes it makes a lot more sense.

A woman going to a shopping mall might go into banana republic to get something for herself, then go to Cap for accessories and stop in at Old Navy to get something for a teenage daughter Online, this would involve visiting multiple websites, putting items in multiple shopping carts, and filling in multiple purchase forms. But now you can do all of this shopping with a single cart and a single checkout.

The site adds great value to the customer’s shopping process, without allowing preciousness about branding to get in the way.

These examples illustrate how widely new marketing to the new consumer differs from what marketing became in the 990s.

If you compare this shopping experience with the tedious processes on the majority of ecommerce sites, you will see that the difference is not minor— it is massive. In a market still characterized by product-centric online catalogues and needlessly baroque shopping processes, there are wide-open opportunities for domination of entire market sectors or highly-focused niches.