Historically, search engine companies (Google, Yahoo!, Bing etc) are among the original innovating web application developers and their success has afforded them with the resources to learn how to scale applications. In particular, Google has been working diligently (as does Yahoo) to contribute to the web developer community, increasing awareness and providing research about creating good experiences with web content. Today they’ve even released their solution to the performance issues surround Domain Name Service (DNS) and with their Google Public DNS project. DNS is the process by which your browser determines which server to query for the pages you request.

It has probably always played a role in the background in some way, but is now a talking point — the speed of a web site is instrumental in how Google determines the rank of your site in search engine result pages. While there may be numerous opinions on the topic, the fact remains that speed is vital to a positive user experience and a healthy eco-system, so those facts make any opinions quite moot. You can now find Google’s opinion on the speed of your web site in Webmaster Tools, in the site performance section (currently still a labs feature). Take a look and see how your site compares to the rest of the web.

WordPress is an extremely popular open source content management system and publishing tool. I contribute to the performance of WordPress via W3 Total Cache, which (from a bird’s eye view) accomplishes a number of goals:

• Make servers more green by reducing the resource demands in delivering dynamic content
• Reduce load time of sites, thereby providing the benefits stated above
• Allow bloggers and other WordPress plugin developers to continue to focus on producing content and easy-to-deploy functionality for WordPress without having to worry about performance penalties / implementation issues or keep an eye on their WordPress installation.

The action items to implement the largest performance wins for web applications traditionally include the following:

• Progressive render: It’s imperative that CSS and JavaScript are properly embedded into web pages to ensure that the user begins to see content displaying as quickly as possible. The term progressive render literally implies that the web site loads instantly with a water fall effect rather than showing users a white page for several seconds and drawing the entire page at once. Proper use of this technique is realized through careful placement and embedding of CSS and JavaScript in the head of the page. As well as loading JavaScript near the end of the page in addition to using pipelining techniques to overcome download limitations in some browsers.
• Reduce HTTP Transactions: This technique takes shape in 3 ways:

  HTTP Compression: the smaller the file, the faster it can be generated, sent and rendered or executed. Gzip or deflate compression is supported by modern browsers and is one of the most fundamental performance wins in web development.

  Minification: the staple technique of Yahoo.com, Google.com and Bing.com for years and instrumental in the “1 second page loads” they appear to have. Combining CSS and JavaScripts respectively, removing white space, comments, line breaks and even inserting CSS and JavaScript inline in the document, (if also compressed) ensures that the least amount of data is sent to the browser.

  Image Sprites: combining multiple images into a single file and using CSS to manipulate them on the page. Since your browser will download a larger image faster (in practice) than numerous smaller images, this is a real performance win when coupled with browser-side caching.

  These methods make sure that there are fewer “calls” to a web server to deliver a page. When it comes to performance, less is more.

• Caching: Cache everything and cache often! Words to that effect are the mantra of hard core web developers. This technique includes setting expiration time for CSS, JavaScript, and images etc that are downloaded from your site. It also includes, caching pages, database queries, RSS feeds and so forth so that your web server spends time sending content instead of generating it. Don’t forget that Content Delivery Networks are also a very important type of cache that significantly reduce the latency of content intended for a global audience.

Will it ever be enough? Doubtful. And there’s much more to it than the few items I listed. Google is already more than kicking tires on their new take on how web enabled devices should communicate. A very ambitious endeavor, but for Google who is bold enough to deploy HTML5 on their main property (Google.com), I’d have to say that they’ve got the resources to see it through. And as always it’s easy to see the wake of Steve Souders’ contributions to web application performance – no doubt a vital contributor at Google (the page speed Firefox plugin?), formerly of Yahoo fame.

The takeaway is this, on the horizon, there will be more talk about the performance of your site and that in turn will raise the bar and awareness in the open source community about how to make high performance applications, the reasons to do it and with which tools to measure those results.

Think Outside the Design
The value of web standards really amounts to recommended use of markup to semantically describe content. Once mastered, the web developer is able to make intelligent and conscious decisions on the “right” compromises to be made for a given project. We are constantly working towards standardization and have had dialogs about the best practices for markup in various situations, it’s the World Wide Web Consortium’s role to define the purpose of markup; the platform for web site optimization. Web site optimization has little to do with search engine optimization or any of the W3C’s validation tools. Instead web site optimization deals with steps taken to improve user experience by:

• reducing page weight
• re-factoring of markup, CSS and/or Client Side Scripting
• making content accessible
• making content semantic
• reusing imagery
• optimizing the weight of imagery
• caching and deferred loading
• reducing latency to reduce download or render time

In short, the goal is to use the minimum code to achieve the desired result. Unfortunately, clients may not always afford us the proper time or resources required to give the most polished result possible.

Think it Through
Web standards in and of itself does not necessarily contribute to reduced file sizes, however what it does do is endorse healthy use of semantic markup that does give way to reduced page weight through table-less markup and a focus on cascading styles sheets for presentational material. By using document object model scripting, procedural code no longer needs to live inline in the html document itself. Take advantage of your page’s semantic structure to use the DOM to the fullest.

Code becomes art when we take our code to the next level by re-factoring it to maximize it accessibility, by reducing our dependency on the markup for presentation and procedural user interface components. What remains to be done when all of the content in a document is rendered as the design calls for, content properly described with your tags, images optimized for reuse and weight? Now, we consider scale, what happens when this site we’ve worked so hard to optimize becomes highly trafficked (think: Digg Effect) — or if the site already is, let’s make sure to optimize the server’s role in the user experience.

Caching is one of the chief techniques to be leveraged to improve user experience both on the client-side and the server-side. Making objects like cascading style sheets and JavaScript files external can also benefit from the technique of combining files to reduce latency. It’s much less “work” to download a larger file once than it is to download (or check for freshness of) several files. Unfortunately, many of the most visited sites could benefit greatly from even a dash of web site optimization. Issues like multiple CSS file or JavaScript files demonstrate little regard for the benefit they could provide their visitors as well as their own bottom line.

Move on to compression; consider pre-compressing your CSS and combined JavaScript files to reduce server load for high traffic sites. Go a step further and create a proxy that makes sure to return the “not modified” codes to user-agents checking for freshness of objects in your site after first download.

Without getting into code for each portion, let’s consider the typical components of a “well-designed” HTML document:

1. masthead
2. navigation
3. breadcrumbs
4. body
5. sidebar
6. footer

Within each there are a myriad of possible methods to semantically describe the content of the components. Let’s have a look at a few basic cases:

• Unordered Lists for navigation, breadcrumbs and copy in list items.
• Non-tabular layout for forms and use of labels and access keys for accessibility
• Use of <p>, <em>, <strong>, <dl>, <h*>, <table> tags for content

Diving into a single common challenge can show how understanding of web standards cascades into an optimized user experience, let’s look at a technique that combines several techniques by several authors, each of which contributing to many fundamental factors of web site optimization; specifically: image reuse, semantics, presentational separation, caching, latency reduction, image optimization, and accessibility/platform independence. Anyway, on to the challenge — image based main navigation with hover effects. Without being distracted with pseudo-code let’s have a look at how using what we know about web standards leads naturally to web site optimization and a very desirable result for the user:

1. Start with an unordered list, in the case of drop down menus, let’s make that a nested unordered list
2. The unordered list is styled as required using CSS such that any copy is moved out of view by hiding overflow and indenting the copy out of view of user agents that support CSS, but still leaving it accessible to screen readers etc
3. Now imagery is added for each of the tabs for the various states (hover, visited, active etc) as necessary

Normally this is where things would end. At this point we have the desired result, but it’s not an optimal experience for the user. Again to the credit of numerous designers and developers turned authors out there additional techniques can be applied to optimize the menu quite a bit:

1. Combine all of the images for each button in the navigation into a single file
2. Combine all of the image states the navigation into a single file and use CSS to shift the desired portion of the image into view when required
3. Put any JavaScript required for desired effects; e.g. transparency, sliding effects support for browsers that don’t support standards as we would like etc an external file

In the previous three steps, we’ve:

1. Reduced the latency required to load the main navigation imagery and the overall render time for a given page
2. “Pre-Loaded” and cached the other anchor states for the navigation without using any client side scripting
3. Cached the JavaScript for the navigation by making it external (the same is obviously true for the CSS), improving the render time for subsequent page views

Now apply a few more techniques to the site as a whole:

1. Take advantage of the compression support of popular browsers and compress JavaScript and CSS so that it can be sent instead of the larger uncompressed versions
2. Combine our CSS files and JavaScript files respectively, similar to the combining technique for the navigation imagery to reduce latency
   Cache these compressed versions of the combined files on the server so that
3. Cache these compressed versions of the combined files on the server so that every page view requested doesn’t require the web server to have to prepare the same files over-and-over on-the-fly. Instead the server can send static files immediately (which it can do with tremendous ease).

With the various techniques we all apply to our projects just adding a few more steps of optimization greatly improves the user experience.

Make it Your Own
Standards simply help us agree on what markup is intended to do and how it’s elements work together for describing content, web site optimization picks up where web standards leaves off. The W3C encourages us to use markup to describe the content and separate the presentation and functionality from markup as much as possible. Once we get used to the idea our time is best spent optimizing our code to work in the real world. I’ve intentionally left out the “how” because that’s an ongoing debate whose conclusions are at best situational. There are quite a few frameworks out there that help developers apply many of these principles to their projects right out-of-the-box, but it’s not too difficult to build your own framework for your own style of work.

So what’s the final word? Well, similar to the stance that Ethan Marcotte put forward I suggest that web standards be the baseline that we use to optimize sites to perform for the targeted user agents. One day it may be easier to leverage standards to achieve a predictable user-experience across all user-agents, but for now it’s best to have more skills and mastery than are required to render a job well done.

The motifs found in sites like the following go far beyond their community driven content:

• craigslist by Craig Newmark & Jim Buckmaster
• friendster by Jonathan Abrams
• meetup by Scott Heiferman, Peter Kamali & Matt Meeker
• Linkedin by Reid Hoffman
• Last.fm by Martin Stiksel
• Feed Burner by Dick Costolo
• digg by Kevin Rose
• technoratti by David Sifry
• del.icio.us by Joshua Schachter
• flikr by Caterina Fake & Stewart Butterfield
• YouTube by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen & Jawed Karim
• the list goes on and on…

Many of these sites have been around for more than a decade and ultimately changed the paradigm of how we use the web, (Tim O’Reilly discussed after the fact in 2005). However it wasn’t until recently that the trends in design that began with these sites finally gave birth to new design sensibilities as well.

Not too long ago, building a community online just meant that people bookmark your site and visited it frequently. Perhaps a site owner pumped out some newsletters to drive subscribers back to the site or partner sites had links to your properties to remind various visitors that you exist. When RSS appeared, it helped people stay abreast of the latest content pushed out from content owners. More recently we work and play in a world where the community owns the content, and if they are so bold, the site owners are only moderators (and the guys that pay the web hosting bills). Great examples are the Wikis (well done Jimmy Wales) we all know and love — good old “folksonomy“. Having said that, we’re also in a world where anyone’s voice can be heavily syndicated and tagged as worthy of note, which is a beautiful thing…

Let me get back to the point before I get lost in the history of forums as the original online communities. Now that a community can control the content and determine what is relevant and important, the visual language that we as web designers are now using has changed significantly as well. Today we communicate instead of decorate (as Phil Brisk put it so succinctly) with design aesthetics — with the focus on content, that’s exactly how things should be. A nice post at webdesignfromscratch.com discusses this trend pretty well imho. These design trends have finally even cascaded into corporate design sensibilities which once accounted for the majority of the design work we designers are asked to perform.

Characteristics like:

• a focus on typography,
• larger font sizes in navigation and copy,
• use of white space and centered page positioning,
• graphically rich layered layouts often using some 3D design elements or icons,
• layouts that compliment the copy in a page and showcase it with sharp color accents where appropriate,
• diligent use of CSS and table-less markup with a demonstrated understanding of semantics, accessibility, usability and open standards

It seems to me that also the DDA legislation in the UK contributed to the “Web 1.5″ as markup that used standards, semantics and exhaustive CSS designs began to take hold and foster a renaissance in the approach to usable and accessible site design. We still don’t see the abundance of layouts that are designed for a resolution higher than 800×600, but this trend is mostly a function of the audience for many of the clients out there looking for our services. In custom business web design, there are of course a number of restrictions that deter us from employing a wider fixed-layout, perhaps that will change as well soon enough.

Thanks to all of those folks highlighted in this post for enabling me to support my thoughts on custom business web design with supporting opinions. I hope this blog will be a destination in the community soon enough.

Despite the awesome drawing power of the www and its ability to sell products and broadcast messages, as site designers and owners, we’ve only begun to harness the true power of a fully-compliant semantic web.

Semantics aren’t new. They’ve been around since scribes wrote on mud tablets. We use semantics everyday in the way we write and speak. Semantics are nothing more than a set of communications conventions to which we all agree.

We rely on punctuation, grammar, spelling and sentence structure to effectively communicate with others. However, throughout the world, a different set of semantics has been developed for each language. In English, the umlaut isn’t used except by Motley Crüe. And you won’t see Õ, g or ¿ used in English writing because they aren’t English semantics. The differences between distinct linguistic conventions correlate closely to the problems of accurate and effective communication via an asemantic web.

HTML: The Universal WWW Language
It stands for HyperText Markup Language and it’s the accepted programming code used for the design and development of web sites. HTML is easy-to-learn, very flexible, it handles text, graphics and other multimedia efficiently and it’s totally scalable, providing the same results for mega- and mom-and-pop sites alike.

However, HTML has one striking drawback. HTML defines where to place what content on a site page, but it can’t discern relationships between the content, or how it could be used to provide more valuable results to user queries. That’s why SEs exist in the first place — to try to develop100% relevancy in a world with “too much” information.

A page of product listings. HTML defines that this is <catalog page 06>. However, it doesn’t identify item #4432 as a hair brush costing $4.95. HTML is limited to identifying a block of text describing the hair brush that should appear next to the product image. However, it isn’t able to determine whether the content is about a hair brush or a manure spreader. HTML places content, makes it interactive with web users and provides site navigation via coded links. What it can’t do is read and index content to make that information more accessible (read useful) to visitors.

Using proper semantics, SEs are able to identify relationships between various chunks of site text, and from a site skin POV, semantics better equip visitors to more easily identify these relationships, whether via browser or as human eyeballs reading the screen.

The use of compliant semantic standards accomplishes two more important objectives for site owners. One, standards enable site designers to more accurately describe site content to SEs and two, semantics facilitate clearer communication between site and SE spiders. These two key benefits deliver more targeted, motivated site traffic.

The bottom line is this. With today’s HTML technology, search engines are able to spider and index web sites. However, they can not index, assess (weigh), correlate and deliver specific content based on the context of a user’s keyword search.

RDF, OWL, XML, et al
To address the limitations of HTML, compatible programming languages and machine-readability apps are available in the site designer’s resource mix. RDF, Resource Description Framework, is one such tool. So is Ontology Web Language (OWL). And the data-driven XML, eXtensible Markup Language, has vastly expanded the ability of web designers to catch the attention of search engines through the development of indexable content.

The implications are enormous, increasing the usefulness of the web exponentially. Here’s an example. Using HTML alone, a search engine won’t be able to produce useful links to the keywords ‘website designers in Boston’. Instead, the SERPs show lots of designer sites all over the world, some of which might be located in the Boston area. Though the sought-after information is available, it’s contained within the pages of many sites — all indecipherable to spiders.

Further, site content is useful within a variety of contexts. What if we substituted the keywords ‘website designers in Massachusetts’ referencing the example above? This SE user has changed the context of the search (and therefore relevant content) from links to Boston-based design firms to links for the same across the entire state. A semantic web would not only deliver specific data, it would do so within a wide variety of contexts.

Instead of simply indexing an entire site, semantically-enabled SEs index content for use in a wide variety of contexts, compile this information based on a user’s query and deliver SERPs with links that take users to the specific information for which they’re looking.

W3C and Semantic Code
The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, has embarked on an important mission — the standardization, improvement and extension of the www. Not a simple task. It entails the standardization of programming languages, development tools, browser specs and now a semantic web — a more powerful, useful and dynamic interface.

However, W3C has many challenges to overcome. First, semantic web technology is still under construction.

Second, there’s rarely agreement within the web community on which apps are best, which languages best serve global needs and so on.

Third, universal semantics are impossible. Semantics for one language won’t sync up with another. Even writing styles — academic with lots of footnotes vs. a blog entry — employ different, accepted semantics. Thus, a universal set of semantics would involve cataloging types of content — a virtually impossible task.

Instead, semantics should be viewed as a set of guidelines to help programmers, designers, software developers and others to use the W3C-compliant tools and protocols properly. Indeed, because the task of connecting web users to specific information is shifting from search engines to site developers, all that remains is for semantics tools to be used properly.

SEO and Semantics
The whole point in developing semantics standards is to make websites machine readable. This will allow search engines to spider and index content with vastly improved specificity. Good SEOs do this while optimizing sites, usually without realizing just what they’re doing. Imagine the results of semantics optimization when developer and SE marketer collaborate to make best use of this emerging technology.

Search engine users will be able to access local news and sports, local sales, locate and compile similar content from widely-disparate sources and in general, access more data within any user-defined context.

With a semantics-compliant web, SEs will be able to better identify relevancy of and relationships within the copy itself and thus save search time and deliver more traffic to that website. The more semantic-compliant a site, the more relevant traffic it will generate.

Site Semantics and Design
If your site designer isn’t up to speed on w3 semantics, find another designer. Yes, new and improved semantics tools are in development but the big SEs are constantly improving their ability to match context and relationships instead of simply identifying literal matches of character strings. And, if your site isn’t semantically optimized, it’s also not optimized for conversions, so you’re missing the best SEOpportunity to come along since the advent of search engines.

Can you afford to ignore site semantics? Not if you intend to be around tomorrow.

The era of Web 2.0 has arrived and we’re all scrambling to become a part of the “web as a platform” movement. The result? Net users now have higher expectations than just a few short years ago.

They’re looking for site blogs to share information, forums where answers are found and the ability to do more than scroll through pages of static text — as exciting as watching b&w television when HD (with surround sound) is today’s standard.

If your site does no more than just sit there, visitors won’t sit there to read through it. If it doesn’t have a bit of sizzle, or perform a useful function for visitors, most site traffic won’t stick around for your latest weekly specials, no matter how low the price.

Search Engine Optimization vs. Smoke and Mirrors
Today, as a successful site owner, you must adopt a two-pronged program to remain successful. First, you have to drive people to the site. Second, you have to get them to stick around long enough to accomplish your MDA — Most Desired Action.

While getting visitors to your site isn’t an exact science, like genetics or mechanics, there are guiding principles and best practices with regard to search engine optimization (SEO). As the major search engine (Google and Yahoo) chip-geeks tweak their search-results-weighting algorithms, SEM strategies adjust accordingly, but still adhere to the myths and facts on how SEs really rank sites. (Is it true that meta tags overstuffed with keywords lower a site’s page rank?)

With some general principles of search engine marketing in mind, and an understanding of the real purpose of a search engine (to deliver the most accurate, relevant SERPs to its users), the latest SEM pros can perform an all-out analysis on everything from keyword density to the HTML title tags on every page of your site (assuming you have title tags on every page). In other words, there is more than smoke and mirrors behind SEO. It works. You can improve your page rank, but what about your conversion rate? Can you get visitors to stick around to perform that MDA you had in mind?

EyeBall Optimization
Sure, you can drive more traffic to your site, but what will visitors find when they get to your pixels? A heap of hard hype? Static clip art? A maze of pages that don’t deliver answers? Today, your site not only needs SEO, it needs EBO — EyeBall Optimization.

The colorful art that festoons the local tattoo parlor walls is called flash in the parlance of the skin and ink biz. It’s the flash that draws in the customers, shows them the goods, and demonstrates the quality of the tattoo artist. It’s called flash for good reason.

So, where’s the flash on your site? Slick Flash animations are becoming more prevalent as more and more web users hook themselves up to the Big Pipe — broadband DSL. Back in the days of dial-up, a 30-second loop of your animated banner took about an hour-and-a-half to download and most of us just couldn’t take the long, slow crawl of the long, blue line. So, we left, and that slick, pricey animation was only enjoyed by the in-laws who thought it was cute.

Flash, in the age of high-speed web access, is no longer just an online dream. In fact, as you bounce around the web, you’ll see these little animations everywhere.

Flash movies and animations are on sites big and small. They’re used for catching the eye of the visitor (Hey, there’s a movie on here!) but they can do much more than dazzle the eye, though let’s not underestimate that benefit.

Flash animations and flicks are eye-catching, but more importantly, they show products in use. This is strong marketing — show the product in use. (Visit any industry trade show for proof of this point.) These mini-cines can also be used to explain and demonstrate key concepts associated with your products or services. In other words, Flash is, indeed, flash, but it’s also educational, instructional and motivational — motivating more of your visitors to become customers.

Gasp! — It Talks!
One of the best features of Flash is its ability to bring sound to your site. Now, instead of putting up some text and hoping visitors understand what they read, Flash enables you to speak directly to the visitor. Filling in the blanks, connecting the dots and closing the sale.

It’s always easier to understand new concepts (new products and services) when you hear about them rather than read about them. It’s just they way most of us learn. So, the audio in your Flash productions is another, powerful selling tool. However, use it wisely.

Some sites run a 30-second sound loop of the same piece of cheesy, rights-free music over and over and over…and over. Nothing — nothing — will send visitors scrambling for their mouses faster and with more desperation than a loop of noxious and obnoxious music. Less is more when it comes to sound — especially in loop form. Avoid like hemorrhagic fever.

Cash for Flash?
You bet. Move it or lose it, as in make it move or lose your customer base. If you only optimize your site for search engines, you just won’t have as many people stick around to get to know you, your products and those wonderful, “low, low, lowest prices on the Net.”

The downside? Sure, Flash is great for EBO, but does virtually nothing for your SEO. In other words, Flash is for human eyes only. The text and other important information contained in your Flash flick are unrecognized by search engines, even if you did spend $500 for that 30-second loop! SEs don’t care. They can’t read text in Flash productions or any other graphics, so you won’t score points with Google, but you will score points with your visitors.

Flash Can Save You Cash!
Let’s say you sell a widget with “some assembly required.” And you find that you’re spending a ton of money on customer service calls from those of us who are ‘assembly-required’ challenged.

It costs a lot more to have a human explain how to insert Tab A into Slot B than it does to develop a Flash animation showing how to put the widget together.

Showing the product in use will also cut down on the costs of processing returns because you’ll have fewer of them. Using Flash animation, buyers can see the widget in operation before the purchase to determine if it’s the right widget for them.

Think of these micro-movies as on-line instructors, demonstrators and money savers. The more you can rely on your site to deliver complete information, the less you’ll spend on customer service and order processing. And, you’ll move a ton more widgets.

Behind the Flash
The key, then, is to develop both an SEO and EBO site, right? Well, thankfully, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, any top-notch site design firm will be able to add lots of SEO text behind the flash, so SEs get the whole picture. Now, some of you are thinking ‘black hat’ site design, right? No, it’s all legit.

Black hat site design includes elements like invisible text — white on white. The visitor can’t see it, but it’s spider food, nonetheless. SEs hate anything that smacks of deceit and rightfully so. These tactics are intended to subvert the mission of the SE — to deliver the highest quality search results. When discovered, these unethical practices drop you like a stone in PR and may get your site banned — the death knell for any online business.

There are licit methods to provide SEs with optimized text that won’t be seen by the visitor. The information presented is useful, not subversive, and so SEs are able to more effectively analyze your site’s purpose and assign an accurate page rank.

Talk to your site designer or webmaster about adding some descriptive, qualifying text behind the flash. Your PR is likely to increase and your conversion rate will go up because more of the ‘right’ people are finding you.

Ahead of the Curve
Within the highly competitive world of e-commerce, would you rather be six months ahead of the curve or six months behind the curve? (Those who answered ’six months behind’ please leave the room.) Of course. You have to be the first with the latest and the most to keep your PR where you want it to be.

That’s why you and your site designer need to talk about adding more to that static text and those uninspired pix. Depending on the purpose of your site, consider adding some movement and sound to stay ahead of the curve.

Is it a movement? A revolution? Perhaps a new paradigm? Or, is it a bunch of hype designed to sell a bunch of new software? Just what is Web 2.0?

Well, the term has been around since 2003. It was coined by I-Net pioneer Dale Dougherty and introduced at a conference by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, Inc., who has subsequently made attempts at defining just what Web 2.0 means. In his seminal document entitled What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, O’Reilly describes Web 2.0 as follows:

“Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.”Tim O’Reilly

Okay, that’s a starting point of sorts — gravitational core, set of principles and practices, veritable solar system. The fact is, O’Reilly, the champion of Web 2.0, has written eloquently on the subject, but after reading his detailed explanation, you still walk away scratching your head. Additional research clearly demonstrates that there’s a lack of consensus.

Tim Bray, writing at http://radar.oreilly.com/, strongly contests the use of the term Web 2.0, calling it nothing more than a meme. Okay, so what’s a meme? Well, we have to go back to 1976 to find the origin of the term created by Richard Dawkins in his text, The Selfish Gene. In it, Dawkins describes memes broadly:

“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Web 2.0 is a catch phrase and one that’s getting a lot of attention within the e-commerce community. In fact, since making its way into the collective I-conscious, there have been more than 9 million Google searches for Web 2.0 information. Somebody’s interested.

Yes, there’s something there, and when you cut through the hype, delete the meme and study the underlying concepts, Web 2.0 does offer some thinking points for every site designer, host and owner. Let’s look at some of the parameters of this new way of thinking about the www.

Extreme Trust
A great catch phrase in its own right. Extreme trust is a new vision for using the collective knowledge of Internet users, demonstrated by the ascendancy of Wikipedia. In the world of Web 1.0 (the model for the past decade), the Internet was a source of information. However, the information was static. You could access World Book or The Encyclopedia Britannica on-line, but all you could do is read it, print it out and use it for your child’s homework.

Sites, such as Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project are changing this dynamic based on the concept of extreme trust.

Wikipedia is a growing collection of information (over 100,000 unique entries) submitted and edited by volunteers. It changes daily, hourly, providing the latest information from a variety of writers of varying degrees of expertise. Information can be edited by anyone who knows more about the topic than the original poster. In fact, if you access certain topics on Wikipedia, you’ll see warnings that certain encyclopedia entries have not been reviewed, and therefore, the content can’t be deemed as accurate — yet. However, as more experts, operating under the doctrine of extreme trust, review each Wikipedia entry, the reliability and veracity of the content increases.

Thus, in the Web 1.0 world, people could access information, but not participate in its evolution. In the new age of Web 2.0, the collective intelligence of the world community becomes accessible and utile.

Personal Participation
Another, much-touted aspect of Web 2.0 is personal participation. Personal web sites have been around for years. You could post family pix and tell the world what you did over summer vacation. But, these personal web sites never really caught on because of the expense and time required to launch and maintain them.

Enter the web log, aka blog. These personal journals encourage greater, individual participation by enabling anyone with an opinion, idea or random thought to post these personal musings for all the world to see. Bloggers have changed the way information is disseminated. Many have garnered credibility as legitimate news sources. In fact, bloggers have received press credentials for newsworthy events. They’re used by the mainstream media as reference and several of these bloggers have broken major news stories before their larger print and on-line competitors, e.g., Robert Novak’s outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative.

The concept of personal participation has also spilled over into the realm of e-commerce, with many on-line businesses offering a blog and/or forum where customers, clients and other interested parties can post their thoughts. Amazon.com is a leader in this area, encouraging its customers to submit reviews of purchased products. In fact, some Amazon reviewers have made names for themselves — and customers seek out their recommendations! As the old, anti-war chant once demanded, Power to the People has been finally realized.

In fact, if you tour the Amazon site, you’ll discover opportunities for customer participation on virtually every page. Amazon’s subsidiary, Booksurge.com has also simplified the entire publishing process. Authors no longer have to approach traditional publishers, hat in hand, begging to be published. Booksurge and Amazon have made it possible for anyone to write, publish and sell texts through Amazon, B&N, Borders and other on-line outlets. Yes, this is part of the Web 2.0 model.

Static versus Dynamic
Netscape was the browser of choice in the Web 1.0 era. It was published, then updated regularly in various versions identified as Netscape 1.0, 2.0, etc. This was a static business model in which users had to wait for improvements to be made, then download the updates.

Fast forward to the dynamic age of Web 2.0 where Google reigns supreme. Google is a true child of the Internet. It was made to fit with I-net dynamics. Improvements are made and implemented daily — seamlessly. No downloads, no patches required. The result? Google has enabled all of us to access the most obscure factoid in a nanosecond. Its index contains well over 1 billion pages of spidered text and that figure is growing at a phenomenal rate.

Google has demonstrated how to do it right. It’s highly interactive, it’s never static and it has created many new avenues for the e-commerce community and for users in search of the name of the pharaoh who was in power when the rotary mill was introduced in Egypt. This has increased productivity exponentially.

The Evolution of Technology
Technology evolves. It builds on what came before. It learns from past mistakes and takes advantage of unrealized opportunities. This is as true of America’s Industrial Revolution as it is for the Internet. There were lots of false starts, missteps and abject failures during the rise of technology in the early and mid-1800s. The same is true of the current technological revolution underway on your computer screen daily.

Remember the original Priceline model? You could spend two hours saving 9¢ on a can of peas. Nice try, but no cigar, despite William Shatner’s campy commercials. Or, how about buying pet foods on-line? That went down in flames, too. In fact, all you have to do is look at the I-net bubble that burst in 2000 to see the shake-out of what was working and what wasn’t. A lot of investors lost a ton of cash, but the Net didn’t shrivel up and die. In fact, it’s more powerful than ever.

Technology doesn’t move forward in straight line. It never has. There are offshoots, improvements and lots of really, really bad ideas along the way. (Anybody remember the Ford Edsel?) Internet technology is no different, except that the shakeouts occur much faster, the improvements take off much quicker and the really, really bad ideas are really, really expensive. Just ask Shatner. Such is the nature of technological evolution.

So, Is Web 2.0 A Revolution?
Tim O’Reilly and the other promoters of Web 2.0 have done us a service by focusing attention on new uses for the Net. RSS is a radical step forward. Podcasting, though in its infancy, is coming on strong having caught the attention of advertisers as a new means to reach the cutting edge public. In fact, just as anyone can set up and maintain a blog, today the technology exists to set up your own broadcast network complete with specialized shows for niche markets like pregnant parents or home schoolers.

However, Web 2.0 also has aspects of a meme. Many on-line businesses have picked up the term and now proudly display a Web 2.0 logo on their home pages, though the site has virtually no new features.

No, Web 2.0 isn’t a new paradigm or a revolution. It’s the natural evolution of a technology that’s growing at truly heart-stopping speed. What was yesterday won’t be tomorrow.

In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll take a much closer look at this evolutionary track to sort hype from help, and to assist you in finding new, better ways to increase site traffic, improve your conversion rate and expand your repeat-customer base.

For now, Google Web 2.0 and start doing your homework. Changes are coming. Will you be ready? If not, you won’t be here tomorrow.

Are you getting the number of return visits to your site that you’d expected? Is your conversion rate increasing as more visitors return daily to read the latest updates you’ve added overnight? If you’re asking yourself “What updates?” you are ’sooo yesterday’s news’ and your site may just wither on the cyber-vine if you don’t take steps to get caught up with what’s happening in on-line content distribution.

Introducing RSS Technology
Web users want something new – all of the time. If it isn’t fresh, it’s not worth the time to visit. In fact, the web is a giant maw that constantly gobbles up content, and what was fresh last week is DOA today. But who’s got the time or talent to write new features, to update the FAQ section and to keep product descriptions current? That takes a lot of time – or at least it used to before the days of RSS technology.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the latest technology to hit the I-net and it’s been a real boon to small site owners eager to keep up appearances with new, relevant content. In fact, RSS is spreading so quickly, it’s tough to keep track of who owns what intellectual property – more a problem for the creators of that IP than site owners taking advantage of RSS technology.

RSS started as a means of disseminating current information quickly and easily across the Net. It was immediately embraced by the blogger community as a way to swap news, headlines, content summaries and other ‘hot off the press’ information. However, the mainstream media quickly picked up on the idea and RSS feeds are now available from CNN.com, MSN.com, a wide variety of weekly and monthly periodicals and a ton of blogs seeking broader exposure. And the list of those sites providing FREE RSS feeds is growing exponentially. Oh, and did we mention – it’s FREE!

The Benefits of RSS to Visitors
You can provide visitors to your site with the latest news headlines, local weather reports, the latest from the worlds of arts and crafts, fitness and nutrition, family issues, finances – you name it, and somebody’s got a free RSS feed just waiting for you. What’s more, you can develop content related to your site and syndicate it to others through your own RSS feed, providing increased exposure for your site and for subjects and topics of interest to your site’s regular visitors.

The benefits to I-net users are significant, even in the infancy of RSS. In the past, web surfers would bookmark their favorite sites and visit them occasionally to see if there were new articles or other useful content. Now, with RSS technology, users no longer have to visit each bookmarked site – the latest information is delivered to them via RSS. It saves users time, it saves site owners time and money and the technology is becoming increasingly advanced.

How Does RSS Work?
To utilize RSS feeds on their computers, web users must install an RSS reader. There are lots to choose from: Feed Demon ($29.95), Awasu ($25), Active Refresh ($29.95), Newz Crawler ($24.95) and Active Web Reader (free) which is our favorite because you can’t beat that price. Active Web Reader is available as a free download from DeskShare.com. and contains all of the features commonly found on RSS readers.

With an RSS reader installed, users simply browse their favorite sites and when they find a site that has a feed worth adding, all it takes is a few screen-driven clicks to hook up and get hooked. No more wasted time browsing for the latest from the quilting sector or the numismatic community. It’s all there waiting to be accessed by the avid quilter or coin collector.

RSS and You
RSS feeds help you (the site owner seeking more traffic and an improved conversion rate) in two critical areas. First, it keeps your site and your content fresh. Search engines view new content quite favorably, improving a site’s PR accordingly. You can develop a long list of RSS feeds into your site from syndicators of content of interest to your target market. Let’s say you’re selling small appliances on line, working out of your garage. You can collect feeds from food manufacturers, nutrition sites, recipe sites, consumer tips sites — all useful to your potential buyers. And the list of on-line businesses offering free, relevant content via RSS is growing rapidly.

The second way RSS feeds help you is by keeping your site’s name in front of potential buyers – daily! You’re providing a valuable, time-saving service while simultaneously building good will and brand recognition within your target demographic. Not bad for something that costs you absolutely nothing.

Even better, you can offer your visitors a FREE RSS reader download if you choose Active Web Reader. There’s no licensing fees, no lengthy, fine-print contracts — you don’t even have to ask the owners for permission. They want you to distribute their software with your feeds (and theirs) included in the RSS reader visitors download from your site.

Unlike in- and outbound links that appear passively on your home page, RSS feeds take a proactive approach to getting your site noticed. They’re better than opt-ins because the user isn’t required to take any action other than to download your free RSS reader. After that, you can actively communicate with your potential buyers, providing price updates, descriptions of new product offerings and the latest happenings in your particular area of commerce.

You can customize the feeds you provide, personalize the information you deliver and increase its usefulness to your target audience and its relevance to your site — and you don’t need a web master to do the heavy lifting. You can update feeds – adding and deleting them – with a couple of mouse clicks, saving you money and putting you in control of your marketing campaigns.

Why RSS Now?
Still not convinced? Google ‘RSS’ and see what pops up. Hundreds of SERPs with articles, software downloads, how-to’s and whys concerning this aggressively proactive, simple XML technology. If you don’t have RSS feeds available on your site, stop what you’re doing, call your site designer and find out why not. And if you’re one of the growing army of site owners who recognize the intrinsic value of RSS, you’re delivering useful, new content, you’re promoting good will, you’re keeping your site at eyeball level and you are seeing increased traffic and a higher conversion rate.

Get current, stay current, be profitable, remain profitable — that’s the promise of RSS feeds to the Internet community. The time to add RSS is now.

You’ve seen the light and the benefits of providing RSS (Really Simply Syndication) feeds through your site. This new technology provides numerous, easy-to-implement solutions for small and mid-sized site owners looking for new ways to connect with customers. RSS feeds deliver fresh content (hourly if you want), providing visitors a reason to come back to see what’s new. These feeds build good will and, unlike passive opt-ins, RSS provides a direct, proactive pipeline between you and potential customers. And it costs you nothing.

Which RSS Reader?
To access RSS content, users need an RSS reader that you can offer to them for free. (Visit deskshare.com for details on their free Active Web Reader.). But you don’t want to offer just a free reader, some feeds from which to choose and hope that visitors will select at least some of your feeds. Instead, wouldn’t it be better to provide a reader with your feeds already installed? That’s proactive and that’s very good.

In addition to its Active Web Reader, DeskShare also offers web masters and site owners an Active Web Reader Customizer that enables you to select and incorporate the feeds you want delivered to your visitors. The Customizer is currently a free download, though company insiders suggest that they may start charging for this software as more features are added. However, because it’s free, it’s the best option for those on a limited budget, which includes all of us.

Which RSS Feeds?
Sites offering feeds usually show an RSS icon somewhere on their home pages. But there are already RSS feed directories to help you on your search for the right feeds to meet and exceed your market’s expectations. Two feed directories worth a look are http://www.syndic8.com/ and http://www.NewsIsFree.com/. Not only will you use these sites to locate feeds, once you have your RSS reader up and running, you’ll also want to register your site with these directories, as well.

Using Active Web Reader Customizer, or any number of other aggregators coming to market, you simply visit interesting sounding sites, click on Add Feed and you’re hooked up. It really is that easy. However, selecting which feeds to add to your RSS reader is another issue to consider.

Virtually any kind of content can be transmitted via RSS. The things that will attract more traffic include:

• the latest news and announcements.
• product updates including new products, price changes and special savings opportunities.
• product reviews.
• informational content.

What doesn’t work is sales copy and hype. RSS feeds are designed for reader convenience, not to provide another outlet to bombard computer users with RSS delivered spam. Use your reader for good, not evil and your site visitors will thank you.

As with links, consider the usefulness of a particular feed to your typical visitor — your target demographic. If you’re selling athletic equipment or event tickets, sure a feed from a pro wrestling organization would work. It’s something at least some of your visitors would read. However, if your target demographic is teen girls looking for low-cost alternatives to cosmetics, that wrestling feed isn’t going to fly. But a feed from a cosmetics site sure would.

Remember, when visitors (soon to be customers) download your customized reader, with all of your feeds listed in an interface window, those feeds should be relevant to the reason the visitor came to your site in the first place.

Marketing RSS Feeds
With your customized reader loaded with dozens of useful links, how do you let visitors know it’s there? There are a few things you can do to push your reader and your on-line sales.

Show the RSS logo.
RDF, XML or RSS logos are recognizable to the growing RSS community and they’re available for download on any feed site. Show your RSS logo on your home page and on interior pages, as well. Let that new visitor know that your site was a good stop.

Create a separate feed page.
Sell the service. It’s a wonderful convenience for users who no longer have to surf to find substance. You’re delivering it to them in a neat little package. Be sure to list your feeds and provide a brief description of what each feed delivers, i.e., news, product updates, reviews, helpful hints and so on.

Get Listed with RSS Directories.
The number of RSS feed directories (see above) is growing. You can submit your site and feed information manually or using automated submission software, especially useful if your feeds and content change frequently.

Offer a free RSS reader.
Nothing sells better than FREE!

Stay Current
Your downloadable, customized reader should be maintained and current, just as links to and from your site. RSS feeds aren’t necessarily permanent and content can change every hour.

Regularly validate RSS feeds to make sure they’re still active and still providing good, substantive content. Delete feeds (Click on Delete Feed.) to remove inactive feeds or feeds that have changed their editorial content or slant. The last thing you want to do is send your visitors to a bunch of dead-ends or, worse, ghost sites, so keep your reader up to date by adding new feeds and deleting the ones that are no longer delivering.

Finally, a word of caution…

RSS feeds employ a simple extensible markup language (XML) to distribute the latest to the most interested, and to personalize and customize the reader downloaded from your site requires a basic understanding of HTML coding protocols. So, if this isn’t your strong suit, hire a web designer to hook you up. It shouldn’t cost too much since the software is low-cost (under $30) or downright free.

RSS works when you get it right, so make sure you do get it right by selecting the right feeds, marketing your feeds and keeping your reader up to date. After that, you’re going to love this technology.