The Website Has Left Puberty
Websites have gone through a lot of awkward evolutions. Sparkly GIFs. Angelfire madness. Angsty Live Journals. It was a rough puberty. For brands, these growing pains culminated in the Flash-addled microsite, which they elaborately sculpted to house their current TV/print campaign somewhere clickable.
These microsites had elaborate art, all kinds of media, all kinds of textures, and one simple nav menu that leads you through the narrow exploration process. With unshareable text that was invisible to search, they made little impact.
But brands are figuring it out, slowly but surely. Oddly enough, their solution seems to be one that merges with other types of sites, from magazines to blogs to shopping sites to personal portfolios. The answer is a simple one, weeding out the clutter and taking inspiration from pop-up blogs. What everyone is creating right now are editorial sites.
The basic elements of these sites are as follows:
A gridded structure and a long page:
Instead of cramping the whole experience onto the space of one screen, the format encourages you to explore, to scroll down for chapter two of a story or to play with a well-organized grid to find the story you’re looking for.
A navigation structure organized by topics and categories:
Instead of building a ton of custom modules to make the site do all kinds of tricks, it’s fairly simple to use the editorial format’s built in tags and categories to create countless, specific but visually unified portions of your site. This means categories creating the overarching navigation and tags let people browse by countless topics.
A large footer:
A chunky footer summarizes the site, encouraging you to scroll down to the bottom.
One-pagers:
While most editorial sites act like entire magazines, some are long, scrolling pages that act like one short story.
Recently I started thinking about why editorial websites might work so well for everyone. But the more I thought about it, the more strange it struck me that it took us so long to understand that websites work best when we treat them like magazines.
Magazines themselves are smart objects of design – timely, topical, labored-over, designed, packed with photography and thought-provoking writing, and affordable. They have a beginning and an end, although those rules don’t need to be adhered to – it’s more about exploring. When we find a magazine, we know what to do with it. Creative content hits us as useful and interesting more than intrusive.
It makes sense that this format would work for more than just publications. One problem that brands have is that their content feels inauthentic. That’s because their strategy is rooted in years of nothing but imperative language (try this tonight!) and useless claims (the best taste since 1945). By borrowing the format of a magazine, brands can use their digital presence to work with people in a way they like working, and provide content they’re actually interested in.
Now that so many sites are focusing on exploration and storytelling, we’re also learning more about what the Internet could bring to the magazine. Some of the coolest contributions are creative footers as bookends, interactive dialogues, and of course social media sharing.
It could be that this a current trend, but I think it’s more than that. After years of interesting experimentation, the website has finally settled into something that works.