For most companies and organisations, the website runs at the heart of all online marketing and digital presence. The nature of most company websites has been to display a little information about the company and the services and products it provides, with a few routes of information capture to allow ongoing dialogue with existing and potential clients. Forgetting the hype surrounding web 2.0, HTML5 etc, the website in its current form, if not already dead, is on its last legs, and we are entering the era of the digital hub.
The digital hub - more buzzword bingo?
Fortunately not - the term ‘website’ will still be used to describe what we are defining as a digital hub. There are, however, key differences, some of which are:
- Device dependency is history
- Websites will no longer be places on the web you visit, you’ll take them with you wherever you go
- Interaction will not just be on the website, but proliferated across social channels
- Brochureware marketing will give way to standardised engagement encompassing CRM and supply chain as appropriate
I’ve stopped short of the ‘intelligent agents’ that Tomorrow’s World promised would be handling all our interactions by now, but just as all the above are trends and technologies that are already in use across many sites, so many of today’s R&D and standardisation efforts are pushing to make these possible. The website is dead, not because these areas will be available in the future, but because we are building with these technologies today.
Device dependency is history
Since you are reading this it is reasonable to conclude that you are relatively au fait with technology; there is also a high probability that you are an owner of an Internet enabled phone, a smart phone or a tablet device. The evolved website will cater for these devices, by routing requests to the appropriate templates or building sites that adopt responsive design. The tacit adoption of ‘best viewed on personal computer’ will soon be met with the same derision that meets the phrase ‘best viewed in “x” browser’.
Taking websites with you
The concept that we will all start taking websites with us does count on having materials and tools that are worth taking, however the technology for this is available and built into most modern tools and browsers. If you are running Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, IE8, Chrome 4 or above, your browser supports HTML5 local storage for offline data storage as well as a plethora of other HTML5, allowing you to take elements of a website and run them offline. In addition to pure HTML, the spread of technologies such as Air from Adobe allows widgets to be pulled from a website to run locally and deliver snippets of functionality that can reside on the desktop.
The social hub
As part of Red Ant’s approach to digital strategy we’ve hung our hat on the concept that companies and brands should reach out to their audience and operate where they ‘live’ rather than expect the audience to visit. Of course, there is no reason that the underlying driver for that communication shouldn’t be the website. With Facebook, for example, applications point back to website pages, fan pages with all their associated material can be interrogated and to a large degree manipulated through APIs that can integrate into websites. For companies that run various campaigns across different social channels in addition to their websites, taking an integrated view and capturing details into a central website-controlled CRM that tracks interactions to individuals is game changing, and opens up entirely new possibilities that the disparate approach doesn’t allow.
The website as an API
Functionality rich websites already exist; the evolved website won’t just deliver functionality, but will open up standard routes to allow browsers and third party tools (e.g. search) to build functionality that will automatically interact with your website to pull out just what is needed. The standards have in a lot of instances been created, the W3C and grassroots efforts such as microformats have been working hard to create them. Some of the tools are ready - I can, for example, drag contacts and events from certain sites and drop them straight into my Outlook. As we hear more of the awful phrase Web 3.0 we’ll all be adopting these (in many cases without knowing), as websites increasingly start to cater for them.
The website is dead?
Of course, it’s not – despite its rapid evolution and the significant change in definition of what we actually mean by the term ‘website’ illustrated above, it will always command a position which is central to any digital strategy. What we currently expect and what we assume to be delivered as standard by websites, however, is ready to be consigned to the great garbage pile that is yesterday’s innovation.
Richard Conyard
CIO, Red Ant