- Sep 21st, 2010
- Online
- 12 Comments
Goodbye Web 2.0, Hello Usability
The Web 2.0 stuff has been a trend for a few years now and everybody wants a web 2.0 website. It doesn’t matter it loads in 5 minutes and 90% of the visitors don’t figure out how to navigate the menu, post a comment or contact the webmaster. Well, I think this really need to end, because people really don’t understand what web 2.0 is about.
We will always get more and more new and better technologies, intended to bring the internet more features, make websites easier to use and look better. Unfortunately many don’t understand this and use them to make anything they could imagine. Right now, an example came to my mind, though it’s not related to web 2.0, but it’s still an usability fail. Remember the falling snowflakes javascript effect ? Every website was using it during winter and it was literally killing your CPU.
What I’m trying to say is forget about the useless trends and think more about usability, because that’s you want from your visitors: to use your website and convert. It doesn’t matter if by conversion you understand a comment on the blog, 3 page views, or a sale, it’s still a conversion you might lose due to the poor usability.
Fortunately for some, a lot of webmasters ensure that it’s a hard job for their visitors to convert and this can be done in a lot of ways, like a really fancy design, dozens of forms register pages and many more. If you competition acts like this, then they will eat dust, because even if they rank above you, people will leave their website and come to yours. Now it’s your job to keep them for yourself or send them along.
Be sure I will offer you some usability tips pretty soon, so make sure you subscribe by RSS or email.
P.S. This post was inspired by “Are you making it too hard?,” a post by Paul Cunningham.
Good point of view, I agree. I also know that things won’t change very fast, because of the desire of webmasters to influence the designing process (as oposed to leaving it to designers and UX specialists).
Just as a side-note: you should check your twitter widget, seems you have a jquery conflict that kills the usability. At least on chrome, i can see the JS code pop right up
That issue is not on my side, but a really nasty bug of Twitter. If you go to Twitter.com and do a few mouseovers, then this is what happens.
web 2.0 hype is already gone if you ask me. It was hot 1 , 2 years ago, now people just want usability like you say
and its going pretty good imo
The hype is gone, but a lot of people still want badly to have web 2.0 websites, even if they are useless. Usability is only wanted by those who know what they’re doing
The dumb and beautiful eh?
Usability, simplicity… the key to retaining visitors.
Exactly
Cool insight on usability. Got to do whatever it takes to retain the visitors!
Yeah, that’s very important. By doing this, you don’t have to stress only about getting new visitors. You need to convince them to return
Good day,I love going through your website, I want to to leave just a little comment to support you and wish you a good continuation. Wishing you the all the best for all your blogging efforts.
Hi Edmond and thanks
Web 2.0 is still cool for me though. Google loves them, even if we use it in a blackhat or greyhat way. It really depends on how you use it and drive traffic, but I won’t take any offense on that. We might still use them to build backlinks and other methods to drive traffic at least. As for me, it’s been a long time that I don’t use Web 2.0 because I already have my own blog.
The point of view here. . .Whatever we used to be, either web2.0 or anything else, the most important is. . .the thing which we are comfortable that suite the needs of our blogs. (^_^)