Key Features to Evaluate When Selecting a Web Content Management System

In the last 8+ years of designing and developing WCM (or CMS, choose your favorite acronym) -based websites, we at Roundedcube have seen an evolving theme of key features to evaluate to make the best choice for your organization. I want to point out some of these features and explain the various options you may encounter when comparing WCM software. Hopefully, you'll find this as a helpful starting point if you are in the early stages of considering a new WCM for your organization.

Content Structure and Presentation Separation
Just starting with the basics, you'll find a wide-range of capabilities and approaches to achieving the ability to "manage content". Keeping in mind the underlying objective of choosing a WCM is to share control of the website with business users, a key component is how does the WCM structure the content and separate it from the presentation (or design code) of the website. You'll discover that some systems at one end of the spectrum just provide a nice user interface to creating and editing content on a page-by-page basis. Beware of these types of solutions as you'll find that your editors will have to re-create the same content over and over per page leading to inconsistencies; and they'll also still have to maintain the proper design and layout of the content. As a result, what you have is a nice editing tool, but not necessarily a WCM.

On the other end of the spectrum you'll find systems that "structure" the content into refined components and allow editors to deal strictly with the content and also avoid having to modify and worry about design consistency. In addition, the same content components are in turn re-used over and over without having to duplicate content. This scenario is truly "managing the content". Depending on the size and needs of your organization, you can choose the WCM that provides the appropriate level of control.

Publishing
Another factor that can vary from one WCM to the next is the concept of publishing. Again, taking two extremes, with one WCM there may be no publishing process - meaning what you edit and save, is what the rest of the world visiting your website will see. However, a typical organization requires some level of control in determining when content is "in-progress" and when it is "live". In terms of publishing, look for a WCM that offers the ability to preview how your site will actually look "if" published and also gives you the ability to schedule publishing by specifying ahead of time when a piece of content should go live and when it should be retired.

Workflow/Approvals/Quality Control
Whichever term makes most sense to you, essentially we're talking about the capability to tailor the WCM publishing process to the process and structure of your organization. A WCM should facilitate your ability to have content reviewed and rejected or approved. A typical organization can get by with a simple "submit for approval" and "approve/reject" option. However, larger, more complex organizations that also incorporate partners and even translation providers may need more complex workflow. Look for a WCM that can provide the level of flexibility you will require - keeping in mind the foreseen growth of your website.

Web and WCM User Security
This is a broad topic. It includes simply being able to restrict pages to anonymous versus authenticated users. It also includes users and roles amongst the WCM users, which permeates the entire system such as securing who can see, edit, approve, publish various pieces of content. Each WCM has a varying degree of granularity and flexibility in terms of security - some much more powerful than others. In terms of security, consider how restrictive your organization needs to be. Will you need to limit the capabilities of your WCM users to specific functions or content areas? Or will it be pretty much wide open and trust that users will use the system as you intended? And in terms of your audience, do you have registered users? What system are they stored in and should they be stored in the WCM.

Search
This is a very commone feature to any website of course. Some systems have a built-in search mechanism and some prefer to rely on 3rd party search tools and simply provide the hooks necessary for integration. Explore what each WCM has available to determine that their search solutions match up with the requirements and importance of search to your website.

Bonus Features!
Now keep in mind that the 5 features above is not a comprehensive list. And they're meant to really represent "core" WCM features. This is a solid start to your evaluation process. In addition, aside from core WCM features many systems now incorporate web marketing aspects - e-newsletters, analytics, personalization, campaign management, forms, etc. Managing your website entirely includes more than content management so if you find a WCM that does a good job of handling these other requirements, that is very valuable. Anytime you can reduce complexity in terms of the shear number of disparate systems you have to deal with, that is definitely a plus. If the system doesn't natively handle these marketing-centric requirements, make sure that they are open to integration via a solid API.

Where to Go Now?
As you know, choosing the right WCM is a crucial decision. I hope this helps get you started in the right direction, but I know its not the end-all be-all for sure. So what's next? I recommend you check out the whitepaper from Sitecore titled "Choosing the Best Web CMS". It goes beyond the 5 features I mention above and digs into issues concerning IT, business users, developers, marketing - everyone involved in the process. Also, CMS Watch is a great source for the latest research and vendor evaluations. I'd like to know your findings as well if you've already gone through this process of choosing a web content management system.

*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com/WhatsNew/Blog/key-features-to-evaluate-when-selecting-a-web-content-management-system

WCM, CMS, OMS – How Do You Categorize Sitecore Now?

Well, it’s Tuesday morning and I’ve had the weekend to let all of the great information and ideas from Dreamcore 2010, held in Boston, soak in. Marco Tana (President and CEO), Benjamin Vidal (VP, Technology), Shane Freeman (Manager of Client/Partner Engagements) and I (VP, Operations/Marketing) saw some great new products and features that are now available or will soon be.

One thing that really struck me was not only the maturity of the product, but the expansion of the product. The terms CMS (content management system) or WCM (web content management) or even that of the OMS (online marketing suite), just don’t do Sitecore justice in trying to explain to potential customers what it is exactly.

From Sitecore CMS to Sitecore Intranet Portal to Sitecore Foundry and from version to version, Sitecore always was a true CMS and then some. With the extensibility and open-nature of Sitecore, the product could be best described as a “framework” for your website or websites in the case of organizations with multiple websites. Sitecore serves as a hub on which other web apps could be built upon and other apps integrated with. But now, after seeing the latest products and features on the horizon, I think the scope of what Sitecore provides is even closer to encompassing all web operations.

The Online Marketing Suite, released last year, was a leap into the marketing space. Now, that is being followed by the all-new Email Marketing Manager and an enhanced Web Forms for Marketers module. So, while I don’t have an acronym for it like WCM, CMS, OMS… its quite clear that Sitecore is solidifying its place as an e-business solution that encompasses content management, applications framework, marketing analytics, campaign management, email marketing management, lead generation, system integration and so on.

And with the release of these new marketing-centric tools, it will be exciting to see how this functionality is integrated with Sitecore Intranet Portal for use internally within organizations… or with Foundry for use across individual affiliate websites and rolled up across such an enterprise. There is some amazing potential there!

In the meantime, we plan to wrap our minds around these new tools as quickly as possible by implementing for our own “e-business” needs, assist clients with similar implementations, and host training sessions in our headquarters offices for any of you out there that want to get the most out of Sitecore as well.

I’d love to hear your thoughts too on how OMS and its related marketing-centric products are shaping Sitecore’s position in the industry.

*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com/WhatsNew/Blog/wcm-cms-oms-how-do-you-categorize-sitecore-now

Quick Dreamcore Shout Out

I’d like to quickly thank everyone from Sitecore for putting up a great inaugural annual event, Dreamcore. You can ask Sitecore and they’ll tell you that I’ve been waiting for this. Even though it was only a couple of days, it was enough to get excited again about the prospect of Sitecore and the world of CMS.

Besides learning about the new stuff that Sitecore has in the pipeline, it was great to know where Michael, Bjarne and the rest of Sitecore gang think the market will be, the so-called “Digital Intimacy.” I don’t think we’ll be competing against match.com or eharmony.com anytime soon, but the idea of committing to your audience’s needs is key to engaging them. You can see this commitment from Sitecore initially with their release of OMS. Analytics nowadays seems to be just a buzzword, but in Sitecore world, it’s more than just giving you reports but it’s about tying things together from the multi-variant test results to actual contextual content delivery that matters to the visitor. It’s basically like eharmony’s “form of a thousand personality questions” and match you with "the right” person…sort of.

I’m amazed at the products presented in the conference. One would think that since this is a Sitecore show, it would just be about the CMS. Besides the improvements in the CMS (such as the OMS and other modules), there are renewed commitments to the Intranet and Foundry. There’s also the Ecommerce module that allows for simple online shopping; also, the Email Campaign Manager seemingly replaces the Newsletter module for more robust online campaigns. I think these are great products on top of Sitecore because they are turnkey solutions that would allow us to penetrate other markets.

Again, thanks Sitecore for the great show. I can’t wait for next years. By the way, thanks for the interview as well. You truly value your partners (we’ve been doing it for 5 years now) and customers.

*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com/WhatsNew/Blog/quick-dreamcore-shout-out

Do you have a favorite local non-profit that needs a Website overhaul?

Tis’ the season! We want to give away a $20K website redesign (or new site or related web strategy) to a local (St. Louis) non-profit charity. We’re looking for an organization that we can help by giving them a web presence and online tools that allow them to be more effective, more efficient, and ultimately do even more good in our community. But we need some help deciding who we should help. We’re accepting nominations now at http://www.facebook.com/roundedcube?v=app_4949752878. We want to know the organization’s vision for the web so we can figure out which one we can make the biggest positive impact for. No strings attached… we just want to do our part in giving this Christmas season. If the chosen organization wants to do more than what $20K will cover, then we’ll simply consider that amount a credit on the project. Check out the full story about what we’re trying to do at http://www.roundedcube.com/whats-new/2009/2009120401.aspx. We’re excited to learn about the charities we can help and plan to make this an annual event.

This summer we also helped another great local charity, PHL, Inc. by revamping their site and implementing a CMS. Check it out at www.phlinc.org. Their needs were pretty basic so we’re looking to up the ante with this next pro-bono project.

*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com//WhatsNew/Blog/do-you-have-a-favorite-local-non-profit-that-needs-a-website-overhaul

What a Release! Our powerful Issue Management tool is now available for commercial purchase

We’re all proud to announce that we’ve released our first commercially available product, RC On-Track Issue Management 2009. It is an upgrade to a tool that we’ve been using for years internally to streamline the QA phase of the web development of our clients’ projects. It came in very handy for enhancing communication between our team members and those involved in the project on the client side as we ironed out problems with the site. Over the years, we’ve seen the demand for the product grow with our own clients wanting to have their own instance for internal use.

But it wasn’t just about bug tracking, although On-Track did a bang up job of that, but it was about issue management, just like the name says. Meaning, all sorts of issues were managed, including not only technical glitches but questions, enhancements, suggestions, you name it, any sort of issue you can think about that might come up during a web development project, we could track it in On-Track. It also serves as a helpdesk ticket system too. This tool became essential to these projects, especially during testing, but also sometimes throughout the entire process. It’s important to note that, even though it’s typically used for software and/or web development – or IT support – it can easily be used for other industries as well. The bottom line is, any project anywhere that can possibly have issues, On-Track can be used to manage them more effectively!

Now RC On-Track Issue Management, still a vital tool for us internally, has matured into a powerful tool that can fit the needs of any company or organization to improve their quality assurance or support processes. We are very proud of the product that we’ve made and that it is now available for purchase. We are also looking forward to the future of On-Track as we are planning future releases to involve mobile application, widget add-ons, and maybe an SaaS (Software as a Service) model to complement the current install model.

The following is a run-down of new features included in this release:

• Unlimited number of projects


• Unlimited # of users


• Multiple security roles


• Customizable issue categories


• File attachments


• Notes and activity auditing


• Multiple layers of notifications


• Improved performance

Want more information? Just check out www.rcontrack.com. Oh and by the way, if you’re interested in purchasing RC On-Track, if you hurry, there still might be time to get in on the special introductory deal, 50% off the price for the first 50 customers! If money is an issue for you, then manage it by buying On-Track now!

*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com//WhatsNew/Blog/what-a-release-our-powerful-issue-management-tool-is-now-available-for-commercial-purchase

Finally: SEO Best Practices

Ever since search engines were invented webmasters have been clamoring to get their sites listed as one of the first entries in search results and using techniques of variable credibility to make it happen. Remember hundreds of “keywords” placed between comment tags? Or in invisible text or ridiculous repetition of certain words in the content?

Those were the old days of techniques that have since been termed “Search Engine Optimization,” or SEO.

At first SEO was indeed about what was in the meta tags, what you had in your keywords and description. Initially it really was the only legitimate and reliable method, i.e. NOT spamming, which search engines have despised ever since those questionable techniques have been recognized as such. For a while, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the rule of thumb about SEO was that there was no rule of thumb, that once methods became effective and truly bumped up websites to the top of the results, once everybody else found out the technique, it became ineffective simply by virtue of everybody else doing it, too. This made it difficult to say with certainty what SEO best practices actually were.

But eventually the world of SEO has become stabilized, largely because the search engine focus has narrowed significantly. MSN, Yahoo!, and especially Google – arguably the king of search engines – have emerged to become the industry leaders. And once a webmaster understands how each one of those work, especially Google, the scope of SEO can thankfully be narrowed because if you’re optimizing for them it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re good to go on any other search engines. As a result of this scope narrowing, certain methods have become timeless and (unless a website pays for premium listings) who is at the top of the list can change every day. Heck, even every hour.

Today, SEO of a website has become almost as important of a step in its development as the design, production, and development. Actually, it has become interwoven into the production process, not really a separate process. That’s the way it should be anyway. It’s so important that virtually entire web production conferences have been held to discuss it. I actually attended one in December, 2007. The techniques have become sophisticated and, at the same time, quite simple. SEO is still a paradox at times, but now in a different way. It’s almost an art, and to master it, you’ve got to know the new techniques to optimize your site for Google. Er, I mean, search engines.

The tried and true techniques are still around – the meta tags – but they have taken a back seat (waaaay back) even though it’s still a good idea to fill them out. Also important is what’s in the title tag. Not only can that influence how your website is spidered by search engine bots but the content of which will usually become a website’s main reference in search results. And of course you don’t want to SPAM, the anti-SEO method, which will get your site blacklisted.

But these old methods are joined by new ones. Some of them have actually been around since the beginning, but were only recently recognized as effective ways to beef up SEO.

So what are these new (or sometimes old) techniques, you might ask?

Let’s start with hyperlinks. Ever since there have been webpages there have been hyperlinks. Linking between internal pages and different websites has been crucial to the development of the web (where would search engines be without them?). Now, your site’s “linkability” is intrinsically tied to its SEO. This is one reason blogs rank so high in search results. One of the speakers at the conference I attended – Web Builder 2.0 (http://webbuilderconference.com) said his blog site about a bicycle actually ranked higher in the results than its company’s! One of the reasons was that blogs, and that one was no exception, place heavy emphasis on linking. There’re hyperlinks on the right and left rails for various reasons (other similar things readers might be interested in, etc) and there’s also tagging and links-a-plenty in the actual content of the blogs and even possibly the comments.

But, why is that so important?

Google’s bots track how much traffic is directed to your site from hyperlinks (and from whence they came) and how much traffic is directed away from your site to other sites. And that boosts your SEO. Why? Google’s bot thinks this way: if your webpage is linking to other popular sites of value then that adds value to your page, especially if those sites link back to you. It’s like popularity by word-of-mouth. If other sites are talking about your site then that makes yours important, too. Another way the bots look at it: in terms of academia, your website is like a paper with references, and as you might know the more references your papers had, the more important it was. Or, at least, they made the papers look more important. So, the lesson here is, as long as the links are relevant (again, NO SPAMMING!), link away!

What other techniques are there? There’s another thing that’s been around a long time but has only recently been recognized as important to SEO: alt-text on images.

Image alt-text – you know, those boxes of text that appear when your mouse hovers over an image – used to be regarded by some to be annoying and sometimes they were even avoided (I used to work for a firm where alt-text on images was denounced). In the past, if it was used, alt-text was mostly seen as a way to optimize a site’s accessibility, i.e. for the blind, as they use programs that read text to them since they cannot see the site. Google and Yahoo!, as you might know, have image searches, but this is only one of the reasons alt text is important. Why, you might ask? Well, think about it. Search engine bots are blind, too! They need them for the same reasons blind users need them. They essentially act as descriptions for images, and that means even more descriptive content on your webpages. It’s even one of Google’s Webmaster guidelines to use alt-text. Just remember, doing something small like adding alt=”[text describing image]” to all your image tags can go a long way to enhancing your website’s SEO.

Oh, make sure the alt-texts are clear and concise, though. If you stuff them with keyword spamming, blind web surfers, who have to listen to their programs rattle off all of those words, will hunt you down and cane you. And of course the search engines will denounce your site, too.

The main point about alt-text is that enhances your website’s content and anything you can do to enhance that will boost SEO. And that brings us to what is arguably the most important thing:

Your site’s CONTENT.

Ah, now we come to the simplest and, ironically, maybe the most overlooked way to ratchet up your website’s SEO: good content. Good in its quantity, but, more importantly, good in its quality. This is another area where blogs get search engine-rank hot streaks. Their content often has more value than the marketing fluff you might find on a lot of corporate websites because of two reasons: One, it tells the user more about the product or service – the good and the bad – than the marketing-speak you normally find. Two, it changes often.

Search engines loooove dynamic content. If you’re copy writing for a corporation’s website, there may not be much you can do about marketing-ease. But you can make the site you produce more dynamic.

The bicycle blog I mentioned earlier also ranked high because its content was more valuable and dynamic than the monolithic never-changing corporate website. It’s strange to think about it, but bots get bored with sites that have text that doesn’t change for long periods of time. That changed, though, for the bicycle site. Now it is more dynamic. And it does rank higher now than the blog (at least last time I checked). The site’s content is more manageable. Having some sort of Content Management for websites nowadays is essential. Static sites are going the way of the dinosaurs. At Roundedcube, we deal almost exclusively in producing websites so that the content can be managed by our clients. We prefer the Sitecore Content Management System, of which we are a Certified Solutions Partner, one of the top in North America I might add.

Being able to easily manage content makes it easier to change it often. Websites are less likely to sit around collecting dust. Bots like having something new to look at and your site will be placed higher when it sees new content. More importantly, it could be ranked higher than the sites of your competitors, if they weren’t as smart as you in choosing a CMS, like Sitecore.

Or if they did not choose a web design and production company like Roundedcube who knows Content Management Systems and SEO well.

There are various other little things you can do to help SEO. The “revisit-after” meta tag is a useful, oft-overlooked tag that can tell a search engine bot when to return to your site. The “robots” meta tag you can actually use if for some reason you do not want a page to be spidered, which for various reasons can help the site’s SEO as a whole, depending on what’s on the page. Use CSS to modify the classic header tags to your liking (H1, H2) so that you may use those for a page’s headers instead of images. Those tell search engines what and where important content is. Even though it’s tricky, depending on how pretty it needs to be, using unordered lists for a website’s main navigation (ul and li’s) helps SEO because search engine bots like them, too, because you’re using actual text – as opposed to images – and lists are one of the things that bots look for. Use current HTML, like tags for bold and italics, respectively, and ditch the old and tags. Also on that, search engine bots use those tags in regards to keyword relevance in your content (although it may not affect your page rank overall) so it’s probably a good idea to use those HTML tags to bold and italicize whenever possible instead of doing it in the CSS, for search engine bots generally don’t look at CSS files. Finally, having a custom 404 error page for your website is nice in case a user does accidentally get lost or wanders into your site via a link on another website to a page on yours that does not exist any longer.

Things to avoid in terms of SEO: all-Flash sites. If they’re mind-blowingly awesome enough you’ll get plenty of traffic. But, even though Flash is working on rectifying the problem, still having an all-Flash site can hurt SEO. Until recently, bots had no way of reading any of the content in a Flash movie. Alternate content, like the alt-text for images, can help this. Here’s a helpful webpage in terms of Flash SEO: http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml

Of course, as I already mentioned many times, don’t SPAM. Don’t put a million key words into your meta tags or image alt-text. Don’t have commented out or hidden keywords, either! Search engines have gotten smart and will smite your website from the search results if they suspect you deal with any of these techniques!

Make sure your title tags don’t say Untitled Document. Or any other default title tag content. Duh. Another no-brainer: broken image tags or broken links. Make sure there isn’t anything dumb like that and, if you link to external websites, check them every once in a while to make sure they’re still valid. Users hate getting 404 pages when they click on links on your site. As do search engine bots.

Change your content almost as often as you change your car’s tires. In other words, get rid of any references to being “Y2K Compliant!” (I can’t believe I still see that sometimes.)

For more information on SEO, check out Google’s Webmaster help center, http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/, which has tips on SEO and many other useful subjects. Or just Google “best practices SEO.”

Happy Googling! And, good luck!

*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com/WhatsNew/Blog/finally-seo-best-practices

Roundedcube Goes West to Ogden, Utah

We just returned from Ogden, Utah a beautiful city wonderfully placed on the east face of Wasatch Mountains. RC was treated with great hospitality and was given a personal tour of this beautiful city. With a great atmosphere and stunning views this city really makes for a great getaway. Ogden is a wonderful place to raise children with a lot of great activities or even start a business. The view of the mountains makes for a wonderful office view or bragging rights to family members in other states with umm "hills".

We personally had an opportunity to experienced some of the great local attractions including mountain biking, the famous iFly an indoor skydiving simulator, toured the Solomon Center and different locations being renovated in the city. We didn't have enough time for a lot of activities because there were so many but I'm certain we will make another trip soon. The city really backs up its reputation as the number one High Adventure Recreation city.

Here is a video of some of our skydiving cubers,




*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com/WhatsNew/Blog/roundedcube-goes-went-to-ogden-utah

Web 2.0 Design Fundamentals

Is Web 2.0 the handy term for a new, user-friendly and dynamic era of the web? Or is it just a buzz word? However you personally feel about the term, there are definite characteristics most people can agree on that define this new era, whatever you want to call it.

It is generally accepted that the first use of the term was at the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004, uttered by Tim O'Reilly. He said that it was "the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

That phrase, "internet as platform," was probably the three most important words to begin to define the often ambiguous term. Since even before 2004 websites have been moving in a direction to become more and more like desktop applications, even sites that aren't considered web applications per se. And to achieve this illusion of a desktop application, web sites and web apps should adhere to agreed-upon design fundamentals of this new "Web 2.0" era of a rich user experience.

Before getting into the actual design tenets, it is important to consider the relatively new technologies that make some of them possible. One of the biggest characteristics of Web 2.0 is managed content, sometimes in back-end Content Management Systems (CMS) for corporate websites, like Sitecore, or user-managed content, like blogs. Another technology to make this move to more desktop-like applications is AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) which allow rich customization, like collapsable and movable windows, just to name a few examples.

One of the biggest advantages of AJAX or other similar technologies is reduction - or sometimes complete elimination - of page loads and/or reloads. This is arguably the biggest consideration with Web 2.0 Design Fundamentals. Anything a designer can think of, and a developer can implement, to reduce page loads is a smart way to enrich user experience and ease usability. Wizards, movable and resizable windows or modules, and interpage scrolling are all relatively new possibilities in today's Web. This is in large part due to a move to utilize DIV layers more than tables, which were the clumsy old way of website presentation, at one time the only real way to do it. Indeed, you can bet that all of these customizable modules are in fact DIV layers, which are much more flexible and liquid than the clunky old rigid tables, especially used in conjunction with javascript, as in with AJAX. DIV layers can be tricky, though, and sometimes unreliable in terms of cross-browser compability if not coded properly, but they are generally much better than static tables.

Tables are still useful, however, for presenting tabular data and forms, which is really only what they were originally intended for.

So how do things like customizable windows and interpage scrolling reduce page loads, you might ask? It's all about doing as much work, and containing as much of the workflow that we can, on the same page. The old way involved http responses and requests - or loading a new page - just to change one or a few things. Like changing options on a form, for example. This was a nuisance to workflow. Now we can delight users by putting things like Drag and Drop, In-page custom editing, Grid Cell Editing, Slide-Our or Pop-Up editing, Auto Complete, Refining Searches, In-Place Drill-Down, Resizable and Scrolling Modules and In-Context tools in our designs.

On the flip side, there exists a list of things not to do, sometimes called "anti-patterns," that will ensure a poor user experience, things that can go wrong when one tries to make their site Web 2.0 without knowing what one is doing. Things like Meandering Way, where the user is forced to go on a tiring journey with the mouse all over the page to get to what they want, Tiny Targets, where key interactions that are almost too tiny to click, Hover and Cover, where the Pop-Ups mentioned in the previous paragraph cover up important information needed to complete the task the Pop-Up was for, Linkitus, inconsistent or bizarre use of linking schemes, and Too Many Windows and Too Much Animation can all leave users of the offending websites with a bad taste in their mouths. Designers and developers must be very careful when treading into the waters of this new era of the web and they haven't been properly trained on how to swim in it.

There are Web 2.0 design fundamentals that designers don't need developers for necessarily, that don't have to involve AJAX or any of the other progressive technologies available today. There are simpler, but still profound, basic tenets of modern design and production that must be considered when it's time to create - or recreate - a website.

One of those rules of the new Web is separation of presentation and content, which is largely achieved via the use of Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS for short. For the most part, these handy documents and accompanying coding techniques began working their way into the web around 2000 or 2001, and were quite ubiquitous by the middle of the decade. Now, you will be hard-pressed to find a website not utilizing CSS and if you do find one it's either grossly outdated or the person who created it needs a serious talking-to.

I will be going into this more in-depth in another article, but what Separation of Presentation and Content is simply about is... well... separating presentation and content. In other words, how the content is presented needs to be divorced from the content so that either one can be more easily changed. A website can be given a new coat of paint, if you will, without the need for a complete remodel. And without the mess of the old font tags and static HTML color definitions, content change is usually a snap. And that's very important because content, especially living content, on a website, as opposed to the monolith online brochures of yesteryear, is very important to this new age of the web. Users no longer want marketing fluff. Content on demand: they want the content they're looking for, and they want it NOW!

Which is why many of the most popular websites today are blogs. Or, like this blog for Roundedcube, Inc., they're used to go along with a corporate website. Sometimes the look and feel of a blog website, even if a site isn't a blog, is considered to be an aspect of designing in "Web 2.0." Things like tall headers, larger fonts (for a while there the trend was to make text smaller and smaller because somebody thought that looked cool and too many people decided to agree), and taller line height makes the text more readable, another sign of how much more important content is becoming.

Speaking of Roundedcube, we strive to stay on top of the latest trends in design and the technology needed to implement it. We employ AJAX, DIV layers, and of course we always use CSS; we want to make our clients happy by making sure users of their websites are happy. And happy users are repeat users. Which is why we design for a rich web experience, one of the most important aspects of what many have decided to dub "Web 2.0."

*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com/WhatsNew/Blog/web-20-design-fundamentals

Open ID is Becoming More Common in Web Application Development

Here is an interview with Simon Willison who is a Open ID Advocate at the Future of Web Apps 2007 Conference in London, UK. Has some good information on Open ID and how it's becoming more common in web applications today.

*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com/WhatsNew/Blog/open-is-becoming-more-common-in-web-application-development