It’s increasingly important for brands to improve and evolve their website to set it apart from the crowd and to provide a unique and meaningful experience to visitors.
Managing Director at the Webby Awards Claire Graves in October at the WP Engine Agency Summit talked about the evolution of the website and how to build a unique and dynamic web experience for your site visitors.
The evolution of the internet
“The bar has been raised,” Graves said. No longer is building an incredible web experience an option, but rather it is a prerequisite for being online. It forces us to build truly original web experiences or suffer the consequences of being overlooked, she said.
Over the last decade there’s been an explosion in easy-to-use and affordable tools used to build web experiences. This has made it possible for even the smallest sites to create amazing web experiences and stay competetive with leading brands.
WordPress
Take WordPress for example. WordPress is an open-source platform that now powers 27 percent of the entire internet and is used by small and enterprise businesses alike. While a whopping 37 percent of the most popular websites in the world run on WordPress, it’s also a leading choice for small businesses and blogs.
“The platform is user friendly and flexible so anyone can use it from in-house developers to the most sophisticated digital shops and agencies,” Graves said.
WordPress provides obvious advantages to its users, enabling them to build on a secure, open-source platform with a robust plugin and theme marketplace, which means scalability and seamless integrations, Graves said.
Shopify
Shopify is a secure, easy-to-use, and powerful ecommerce tool, which enables its users to build incredible experiences. Sites like Tesla trust the tool to power the ecommerce functionality on its site, she said. Graves compared this to small t-shirt selling company, which although a fraction of the sizes also uses the tool.
But it’s not just the tools…
It’s not just the tools that developers are using, “it is literally the code that underlines everything we do,” she said.
These 11 lines of code are used on tens of thousands of websites. “It’s an integral part of JavaScript engines and compliers like Node and Babel, respectively, which programmers use to update and run sites like Facebook, Spotify, Airbnb, and Netflix and thousands of others across the world,” Graves said.
This code was created and released on the open-source repository npm as a free download by developer Azer Koçulu.
Developers started to use the code as a core part of their software. Koçulu continued to develop and release several packages of code — one of which he called kik.
But things became hostile, when the lawyers from the messaging app Kik contacted Koçulu to change the name of the package. Koçulu got angry and pulled his package from npm along with those 11 lines of code used throughout the internet. “And the internet crumbled,” Graves said.
This is a perfect example of just how fragile the internet is.
Navigating the sea of sameness…
We’re approaching a period of singularity in design, where all websites are starting to look the same. This is both the fault of the design trends and the tools that we use — we use the same stock images, the same design trends and the same developer tools. So, while these help build incredible experiences, they are also fueling an internet where all websites look the same.
“We’re even getting to the point where our hardware is the same, Graves said. “Most of us use one of a handful of devices and OS, which, in turn dictate the experiences and design of the apps and the mobile Internet.”
Historically, the landscape of mobile was vast — there were phones for messaging, business, and photography, but today there are a few phones that are used for all of these purposes, thus fueling the sites designs for these devices.
So what now?
Graves outlined four big rules when it comes to creating web experiences: Entertain, be useful, create immersive experiences, and utilize machine learning.
The Webby Awards teamed up with Harris Poll to better understand what creates a compelling web experience. The results show that almost 60 percent of respondents told someone about something they saw online because it was either funny or entertaining, Graves said. Moreover, a whopping 68 percent indicated that the reason they return to a website is because it was useful or helpful.
Immersive experiences are a leading point of differentiation for websites because it offers a channel to completely engage with audiences in a novel and unique way. In the same vein, machine learning is an innovative way to leverage data to do something in a human-like way. These are all important when trying to set your websites apart from the crowd.
Wrapping up
To recap, there been a boom in helpful dev tools and resources to help build websites. While incredibly useful and important for building powerful web experiences, because everyone is using the same tools, the same code, and leveraging the same design trends, websites are starting to look the same. To differentiate your site remember to entertain, be useful, create immersive experiences and leverage new technologies in novel ways.
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