Six years ago I created the Web Site Structure Management (WSSM) concept. In 2002 I published this concept within the broader perspective of On-Site Marketing Concept (soon, I will elaborate this concept on my blog), in my book in Serbian language “The Guide Through Internet Marketing’s Heaven and Hell”. In this post there is the explanation of new perspectives regarding WSSM concept in Web 2.0 environment.
Definition of Web Site Structure Management
In 2001 I defined WSSM as
…the way to organize Web site’s domains, directories, and navigation on different Web pages, according to customer needs, using content management software with implemented Web Site Structure Management solution.
The use of WSSM concept is particularly helpful for the complex Web sites with completely different user groups and with thousands (millions) of pages.
Why now?
According to latest presentation of Behavioral Advertising trends by Emarketer, as well as the issues related to visitor/customer online engagement (previous article on my blog), there is need to emphasize something very obvious – for the actual online marketing developments there is an urge for a knowledge (expertize). Within the very interesting observation of Matthew Haughey on his blog (related to attention economy issues), that contextual advertising has to be targeted to particular user groups on some Web site (new users Vs. regular ones), again it is said that online marketing is not that simple (nor any other job, if you want to do it professionally).
Web Site Structure Management can be the additional tool for the establishing and maintaining advanced online marketing strategies, related to on-site optimization activities (such as structure, content and CRM).
Web Site Structure Management 2.0
On the structure level, Web 2.0 concept introduced tagging and folksonomy (the special case of tagging, generated by “folks”), as the alternative ways to solve the problem of Web site structure (alternative Web site structures, or taxonomies).
On the level of SEO activities, there is a custom to create search engine friendly URLs, with a keywords (made by copywriter) or keyphrases (A combination of words on your Web site that matches the search term). With Blog CMS-es is is already easy to do it, as well as a lot of different CMS solutions have the implementation of SE friendly URLs.
On the Internet technology level, there is a great shift in better Web site user experience design. The creation of visitor/customer engagement devices (related to product/content online merchandising) with AJAX technology, can be paramount for an easy creation of different levels of navigation, related to part of the site or sub-site; related to visitors/customers group; related to actual Web page content; related to visitor’s behavior (the path of the visitor through a Web site)…
Social media and user generated content brings additional structuring trouble when they have to mixed with other Web site content…
In 2007 I can say that
Web Site Structure Management Concept represents the consulting and technical solution to establish and maintain organization of the Web site, that meets the different goals of Web site owners, and the expectations of different Web site user groups.
In the next posts about WSSM concept I will provide some examples to clarify the issues I am writing about. Some inputs (outputs) from you will be very helpful for my further posts on this subject.
