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Design Considerations for the Web 2.0

For a long time, web design was handled by those with the necessary technical skills to build websites. It was often the same person doing both the front, and back end of a website. These are two very different skills and really, one should lead on to the other. The more you look at Web 2.0 services, it becomes obvious which ones have spent time, money and expertise on their interfaces, and those that have not. But of course the Web 2.0 isn’t all about the big sites, this applies as much to those going through Blog designs as anyone else. To emphasize the areas where you can succeed and fail in designing a Web 2.0 site, I’ve picked out a handfull of aspects that you need to consider, and what you should consider for each. So let’s get started.

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Web 2.0 Basics - RSS & Feeds, a Template for Increasing Subscribers

A more appropriate name for this post, if used correctly, might be “A template for boosting subscribers through education“.

Most bloggers are aware of the opportunity feeds offer them. It’s a guaranteed way to get your content in front of readers, readers who have asked to see it in advance. It’s very powerful, and the sort of thing money can’t buy. Unfortunately, the majority of Web users are still largely oblivious to feeds and the advantages they offer to them. Therefore, it’s important to come up with a way to describe feeds, which is actually a fairly technical solution, using words they can relate to, and understand. This is my attempt to do just that. Dare I suggest that you put words to this effect somewhere on your blog, just to ease the non-technical readers into the concepts involved in subscribing to a blogs content. Unfortunately, I think there’s this assumption amongst bloggers that putting subscribe links up all over your blog is enough to get subscribers. But, this will have no impact at all if you happen to cater for a niche where the audience is not particularly tech savvy. They need to know what a subscription is, how it works, what the benefits are and how they do it.

This site offers the ability for you to subscribe to our new content. What this means is that when we write something new and brilliant, it will be delivered to you. What this really means is, you can now get the latest from your favourite websites in the same way you get your mail. Imagine RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication) is the mail man. When you wake up every morning, you don’t go to all your friends to ask whether or not they’ve sent you any mail, you wait for the mail man to deliver the mail to you. Now you can do the same with websites, just sit back and wait for the content to come to you. Subscribing in this way is free and you can unsubscribe any time you like. You also get to chose how you receive the content. If you like, it can be delivered to you through email or you can use one of the many News Readers out there, such as the excellent, and completely free, Google Reader. Regardless of what News Reader you decide to use, simply copy the subscription address from the site and paste it into the “Add Subscription” field in your reader. It may not be worded exactly like that, but these things are really easy. We hope you enjoy our future content, and hope you contribute to our blog.

I think the above uses a nice analogy to explain how subscriptions to users who may not be familiar with them. By introducing Google Reader, and explaining in simple terms that once you subscribe, you can unsubscribe at any time, you will encourage new readers to take the plunge. Of course, you will want to tailor it to your content, especially if it’s not for a blog. It’s also written in (hopefully) English-English, as opposed to American-English, see the “u” in favourite?

If you have any feedback, please drop it in the comments. I’m going to be adding text to this effect on all my sites that offer subscriptions over the next few weeks to see if it has any impact on subscriber numbers. Let me know if you do the same.

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