I have read a couple of things online recently pointing out that the rules of good aesthetics for web sites have changed little over the last 10 years and that one of the biggest mistakes web site owners make is to choose to change the look and feel of a site when it doesn't need it. There is a school of thought which suggests that a web site should be redesigned every two years but there are other (perhaps more relevant) views. If your site is not performing to you satisfaction (not enough hits; too high a bounce rate; poor ranking; etc etc) then maybe the problem is in the content and functionality not the design. If your site is doing well then maybe you should build on that success not try to rebuild it.

Look at some of the most successful web sites and see how little they change the way they look. Think Amazon, Yahoo, Google even Microsoft. If you look back at the dim and distant past (just short of 10 years if you include Google) and look at the sites for these and other successful web companies you will see that little has changed. Sure they've incorporated new technologies and taken account of changes in computer technology and bandwidth and so on but aesthetically they are very similar to 10 years ago.

Don't get me wrong, good design is  paramount to success but providing what the customer wants and helping them find and use it is the key to longevity.

Anyway, I'm off to sell some more design and implementation services and perpetrate the two year myth. 

On Tuesday evening (GMT) our partners, Open Text, broadcast a webinar entitled 'The Future of Web Content Management'. Sounded right up our street so I registered and then asked Doug to login and listen on my behalf (Celtic vs Barcelona, what can I say). Much of the presentation was a repeat of one we were given at the Red Dot conference in Cologne last November and it lays out the intention to make the WCM (in this case Red Dot) the primary access medium of content owners. This layer will sit on top of all of the IT clever stuff (not that Red Dot's not clever just not as Enterprise clever as ECM ect) and various content silos around the business. The presentation also included a first look at the new Red Dot offering and we (i.e. Doug) were very impressed.

The focus in the industry is apparently back on personalisation and, therefore, classification either via top down taxonomies or bottom up tagging. Our friends at Cintra were obviously ahead of the game by a long way.

We have also been advocating the advantages of classification and the benefits to personalisation (particularly for intranets) for some years; hence the relationship with Cintra, but there is a body of clients that have reservations about the practicalities of implementing classification policies or the accuracy of automated tools. The answer to this is of course that you get out what you put in and it is worth the effort, no question about that. The problem I see is that most sites don't try to provide solutions of the depth that require such functionality and users, therefore, don't know to expect it.

In the early days of the web the big buzz phrase was 'content is king'. Well, this is still true it's just that most users are still republican.  Nevertheless, look out web 2.0 is actually coming to a browser near you and when it gets there we will see another big shift in internet usage patterns. Facebook et al are toys. Once you've registered and collected all the contacts you no longer have in the real world and realise why you haven't kept in touch with them, there's little mileage for most over 25's and, despite Microsoft's interest, there is still o real business model.  Remember Friends Reunited? Soon we'll see real value to users coming out of the long tail of social networking and some profitable business models on the back of those.

As we say in the office too often to retain any credibility for ourselves -  'interesting times'.