When you are redesigning your web site, first take stock of the goals and functionality that you want your site to meet or have. When you know your goals and necessary functionality, you can then determine the structure of your site—the navigational structure, various site paths, and links between pages.

Think About Conversions

A conversion occurs when your site visitor takes one of the actions that you want him or her to take. These conversions, and the multiple steps (mini-conversions) that lead to them, are the whole purpose of your site. If you run an e-commerce site, the main goal is for your customers to add products to your cart and complete the entire checkout process. A forum wants users to sign up, read and make posts, and return frequently. Informational web sites want people to return and read or listen often. Some sites are designed to generate leads for salespeople.

You want to structure your site so that it is as easy and as desirable as possible for visitors to complete the desired actions—to be converted.

Think About Spiders

The easier you make it for a search engine spider to get around your site, the more pages it is going to find, index, and (hopefully) rank. If you make the link “tree” simple and easy to follow, you stand a better chance of pleasing a search engine spider.

Think About Confused People

No one is going to know your site as well as you do—click paths for actual visitors can make it seem like your visitors are drunk, lost, or just plain silly. Trust me, though, they usually (and hopefully) aren’t any of those things. They just won’t know your site very well from their initial visit. You need to make the structure or your site intuitive enough that your visitors can understand it quickly without hand-holding.

Another major problem I have seen as I have designed or redesigned web sites is that often the navigation structure is inconsistent. Inconsistency is worse than complexity. Imagine, you land on a site, click to go to a product description, click to the features page, and then want to go back to the product description. Now, though, instead of being first on the list of navigation links, it’s 4th and it’s called “product outline” or “product overview.” Huh? You will lose and confuse your visitors if navigation paths aren’t consistent.

My Basic Process

After designing many sites, I have a basic process that I follow for designing a site. Here are the main steps that I follow:

1. Define Main Areas

   Luckily, you’re not starting from scratch when you start to define the main areas of your site. In fact, there will usually be at least one area for each of the main functions of your site.

   For example, KindredLearning.com has five main functions that it’s supposed to have: store, newsletter, articles, company news, and general company information. After looking at all the different pages that we wanted to include on KindredLearning.com, we decided on six main areas: Four Year Plan (the main selling point for Kindred Learning’s entire business), Products, Newsletter, Articles, News/Updates, and About Us. We added only one area, and we did it in order to make certain educational materials on the site more prominent.

   These main areas make up the “main level” navigation of your site. Your visitors can see the main things they can do or learn about on the site in a glance from anywhere on the site.

2. Assign Pages to Areas

   The next step is to make a list of all of the pages that need to be on your site and then assign each page to one of the areas. Most of the time, it will be clear in which area a page belongs, although you will occasionally have a page that seems to belong in more than one area. It can be really tough to decide where to finally assign this page. You can make every page accessible from many places on the site, but you need to assign every page a “home.” These associations can be changed, but changes need to be made with GREAT care—changes to associations and navigation menus are the number one way to introduce navigational inconsistency into a site.

3. Set Up Levels

   Once you have all your pages assigned to the different areas, you’re ready to impose a little further structure on your site. Some pages will naturally belong to certain sub-areas or categories. You can group these pages together and then create a new “index” type of page to link to each of these pages. You can also link to pages right from the main area page. These groupings, indexes, and assignments create a hierarchy for your site, one which is hopefully clear, natural, and easy to follow.

I usually perform the task of structuring my site on a white board, a large piece of paper (the same way that Carolynn Duncan solves big problems), or an Excel spreadsheet. It usually ends up looking something like this:

Click to Enlarge

You can see the areas along the top (I really like tabbed navigation at the main level), the pages and indexes below them, and the sub pages below them. The hierarchy has worked out clearly and is usually no more than about three levels deep.

At this point, you’ve succeeded in determining the goals of your site, deciding on the functionality necessary to achieve these goals, and mapping the functions and information to a navigational wireframe.

Finally, go through the structure of your site and think about conversions, spiders, and confused people again. If your structure satisfies these needs, then you’re good to go.

In general, content generated by communities is dragged down to the lowest common denominator. There are, however, some very notable exceptions.

Popularity Contests

Content, especially multimedia, that is judged by its popularity, and not necessarily its academic quality, thrives in community settings. New versions, parodies, and works inspired by music or videos crop up quickly. The most popular content is voted up and passed around, and anything that is of lower quality (meaning popularity), or simply old, fades away.

Here It Goes Again—A Viral Hit

A band called “OK, GO” released a music video that made its way onto YouTube—it was a viral smash:

Here It Goes Again

Here It Goes Again, Again—A Remix of a Viral Hit

Some time after the first music video was a hit, the following parody/remix video (along with tons of others) was posted:

Here It Goes Again, Again

Often a big hit will inspire several mini-hits and take-offs. Media is an example of community content that is benefited from, and not dragged down by, community influence.

Content Granularity

The other major reason that media and blogs benefit from communities, instead of being dragged down by them, is the content granularity—the community creates lots and lots of small, encapsulated works, instead of working on one large work. Each individual work is judged on its own, unlike collections made up of pieces but judged as a whole, such as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. So communities with fine content granularity are not harmed by community content generation.

Niches

Self-selecting niches, groups of people that naturally congregate and have common interests and skills, overcome the problems of community-generated content. A niche naturally attracts those that belong and repels (or is ignored by) those that do not. However, they don’t solve the problem of having the content dragged down to the lowest common denominator, they simply solve the problem of raising that denominator.

When you talk about raising the quality of work in a community project (or a business), then, you must make your content granularity finer, dispose of the “unworthy” parts before they are incorporated into the whole, and make sure your niches or teams are selected well—whether the members are naturally or intentionally chosen.

Actually, the question about whether Google will create a Google Office is nearly moot—Google has been moving in the Office direction for at least a year and Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a major step in that direction. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is an integrated spreadsheet and word processor solution. Google also offers email, calendaring, and templated (PowerPoint-esque) Google Pages. Google has a few steps left to bring these services up to full horsepower, and then integrating them and managing users’ data is all (!) that’s left. Google could have an online office suite in a year.

Obstacles to Adoption of Online Office Applications

There are still a few hurdles left before online office applications steal me away from the desktop equivalents:

1. Availability:

   I don’t have universal access to the Internet yet. There are lots of places I go where I can’t get the Internet and wouldn’t have access to my office applications.

2. Performance:

   Ok, so assuming that I wouldn’t really need an office application in locations where I can’t get the Internet, there’s still the question of performance. Even with a high speed Internet connection, sometimes online office apps would choke when a normal office solution wouldn’t.

3. Security:

   The last problem I have is with security. How are my documents and information going to be safe? This is a truly fundamental question for Web 2.0 in general, not just Google Office. If my data is residing on a server somewhere, who is going to hack in and steal it? Tied to this issue is privacy. Is the government going to subpoena a company to give it to them without notifying me? Implementations of good government intentions aren’t always so good, laws aren’t always perfect, and I don’t always agree with the government. There are some cracks in the system that I am worried about.

Not If - When

I don’t think that there’s any question of whether or not there will be integrated online equivalents to Microsoft Office. Even if they won’t work as well as a desktop version, and even if they ultimately fail, there are a bunch of companies who are going to try it. They will even be able to overcome two out of three of the obstacles—availability and speed are technical obstacles which can be overcome, even relatively easily. And number three will be decided, one way or the other—by choice or by default.

(see more Google web services for more info on directions Google could take.)

I have recently seen the influence of Google’s Jagger update at work on DiamondLime.com. There were three steps that occurred with my site:

The Jagger Sequence

1. Traffic Changes

   The first thing I noticed was a shift in traffic patterns for my site. I saw a sharp increase in traffic for most of the important keyword phrases relevant to my site (which makes sense, since I have been adding content regularly) and a slight decrease for a few terms (which I have left stagnant).

2. Only Supplemental Results

   It was scary when I typed in site:diamondlime.com one day to find that only 3 of my pages weren’t supplemental results or eliminated altogether—my home page, the Lime Blog, and my business page. I suspected it was only the site command that was inaccurate, though, because my traffic didn’t hiccup. My pages were still being served in Google’s results pages.

3. Updated Listing

   After a week or so of being in supplemental results limbo, my entire site was re-spidered and listed in Google again. My reported page rank has been updated, too.

Weathering the Storm

It looks like DiamondLime.com managed to weather the Jagger Storm intact. The important things, like traffic and being ranked for keyword phrases, survived or even improved. I attribute this success to the fact that I have done my best to build a reputable, white-hat, recommendation-abiding web site.

A curious thing that happened to DiamondLime that isn’t likely to happen to other sites is that the reindexing of my site happened during the 1 hour period it took for me to upgrade my site! Consequently, the titles of my pages were scrambled before I could adjust them after I upgraded Wordpress last weekend. I have missing spaces between post titles and the name of my blog (”» 2006 » JulyThe Lime Blog”). Hopefully it won’t take Google until another major update to reindex my site and correct these goofy page titles.

I’ve run DiamondLime on version 1.5 of Wordpress for about 8 months now. Everything has been working fine, so when version 2.0 of Wordpress came out, I was reluctant to change—if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, you know?

Eventually, though, I would have to upgrade—support and updates tend to shift towards newer versions, and I don’t want to become the victim of some hack of old versions. I’ve waited for several months since version 2.0 was released to make sure it is stable and happy, and I finally took the leap and upgraded this weekend.

Simple Upgrade

Upgrading Wordpress is, thankfully, a simple process. The most difficult part was backing everything up before I installed the new files, but even that was easy with this great tutorial on backing up your Wordpress MySQL database.

Spam Is Gone - Akismet Saves the Day

I also enabled Akismet (I was going to install it anyway, but having it installed by default is great!), grabbed my API key, entered the key in the configuration, and kissed comment spam goodbye. I haven’t seen any get through since I installed it, and I hope it stays that way!

Spit Polish

Finally, I took some time to update a few visual items on the site, hopefully improving the overall look, feel, and usability somewhat. The biggest of these updates is simply adding a more prominent picture of myself so that my readers can connect with me better.

For the most part, readers of the Lime Blog won’t even notice the difference these changes make, but I was happy to get them done and to be able to continue with creating content instead of spending time on management issues. I can also personally vouch for Wordpress v. 2.0 and Akismet—you want your blog running these two pieces of software!

I’m not the first to discuss this topic, not by far, but this is a very interesting problem: Is Web 2.0 a Friend of True Knowledge? This article talks about recent events surrounding Wikipedia and one of its co-founders, Larry Sanger. Sanger is planning a “high brow” intellectual spin-off of Wikipedia, due to what he feels are 4 “serious and endemic” problems:

1. The Wikipedia community doesn’t follow its own rules, fostering abuse of the system.
2. Anonymity means that no one takes responsibility for their work, and thus trouble-makers have the ability to mess things up without consequences—the troll problem.
3. The leaders of the community have become insular—it’s hard for qualified individuals to join.
4. The community is “off-putting” to academics and professionals. They don’t feel comfortable about contributing to a community that won’t adequately reward or protect their work.

The Danger of Communal Knowledge

The problem with many communal knowledge pools is that, because everyone can participate, the quality of knowledge and information contained in the pool can be dragged down to the level of the least qualified participant—to the lowest common denominator. It’s like group work in school classes—it can be very difficult for the group to produce high-quality work when a member of the group is contributing poorly or even actively hampering the group’s progress. It can be easier to simply remove such a person from the group and continue with those who are constructively contributing. This is what Sanger is proposing to do with his Wikipedia spin-off.

So, Is Web 2.0 a Friend of True Knowledge?

Where bodies of knowledge are open to any contribution and there are malicious or under-qualified contributors, the answer is no. Such bodies will never rise above the lowest common denominator. Too much salt will ruin a cake, no matter what the quality of the other ingredients is.

To be friendly to true knowledge, Web 2.0 groups and applications must:

1. Establish and follow rules for contributions and reviews
2. Be able to eject sub-par contributors and bogus content
3. Capitalize on above-average knowledge and expertise

Web 2.0 is About Collaboration

Web 2.0 philosophies and applications are about enabling and fostering collaboration. Establishing group rules and choosing collaborators is a problem that has always existed and is not unique to Web 2.0 projects. However, as collaboration becomes easier, it is easy to make the mistake of including too many group members and relaxing participation rules so that no one feels left out, increasing the chances that the mix of “ingredients” will contain something “spoiled.” As aggregating and organizing knowledge becomes easier, discerning good work from bad work is the next serious problem.

If problems with groups and rules can be resolved, then Web 2.0 is a friend of true knowledge—Web 2.0 is simply a tool that can facilitate the collaboration and growth of experts and the distillation of scattered pieces of information into new and exciting works. As with other tools, garbage in equals garbage out. We have awesome tools, but we must use the correct inputs.