Bogdan Pop : Web development , Photography , Dj

No. Or at least, most of them, don’t. And this article will explain why.

First off all, if used wisely, web 2.0 concepts and features prove to help a lot a website to grow, evolve. Any web developer wishes this for all the projects developed. Unfortunately , not all web developers actually know what web 2.0 is about.

• Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. They can build on the interactive facilities of “Web 1.0″ to provide “Network as platform” computing, allowing users to run software-applications entirely through a browser. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data. These sites may have an “Architecture of participation” that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. This stands in contrast to very old traditional websites, the sort which limited visitors to viewing and whose content only the site’s owner could modify. Web 2.0 sites often feature a rich, user-friendly interface based on Ajax, Flex or similar rich media. The sites may also have social-networking aspects.

So indeed, web 2.0 features can help, but many web developers should focus on “web 1.0″ aspects of the site and do them correctly. Everybody tends to build every aspect of the site by the “laws” of web 2.0 because they follow up a trend. Just like in fashion, but I am sure you have seen and you see everyday people that try to dress up in Armani while they should be in Adidas.

So why on Earth do we need e-commerce websites that use drag and drops to buy items, when most of people who try to shop online are having a big problem when it comes to register before they can buy anything.

Of course, fancy animations, cool features like drag and drop work very well for different applications we all use each day on our PCs, but if we design a website, do we need to add drag and drops and all sort of effects to each byte of text? If we want to confuse the users, than yes.

One good aspect of web 2.0 features and technologies are, for example, partial updates to a page. AJAX allows developers to change and update only a small part of one page at a time, so this means that the user will require less traffic to do what he needs to do with that website. This also means faster response times, and we know that the faster you do things, the better. But it is better only if the users know what’s happening.

Take for example websites like Amazon. They are over cluttered, they offer you a web search engine (if I needed one I’d go to Google, not Amazon) and tons of other information you do not need. It would possibly be just about ok (wait… who I am kidding here), but they also have lots of web 2.0 features implemented, fancy scrolling (like apple’s coverflow),  and many other features I myself find hard to work with. For example, they have this button, “add to wishlist”, but I am not sure how to use it. I can’t click it but I know I have to use it from the “options to the left”. If I cannot find them, how is a 45 year old bus driver going to find them?

So, big companies go wrong about their websites, small companies go wrong as they follow up these big companies, so we are pretty much doomed.

My point is that each websites doesn’t need to be 100% web 2.0. It is enough to have only  a few web 2.0 features, and it will be great. Therefore, perhaps web applications should have a big percent of the web 2.0 features, but government or corporate websites, if I may say, shouldn’t have that much of the web 2. features. If I would develop a government website, I will use web 2.0 only for fancy contact forms, or any other forms, just not to let the user type over and over again until he gets the job done.

So, once again if you forget this rule, you should really focus on what the user wants, not what you want, or what the trend is like.

Sources: www.wikipedia.org / www.useit.com