You’re going to be bombarded with lots of buzzwords in this post – don’t be put off. By the end, you’ll have a vision of the future of the web you never thought possible. Let’s start with Alisa Leonard-Hansen‘s presentation explaining portable social graphs:

Now, let’s move on to Jesse Pickard and Shiv Singh‘s presentation imagining their potential, using the example of Facebook Connect:

They gives us a glimpse of what the next few years will bring in terms of the whole web becoming social. To quote Charlene Li:

in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be

We’ve already implemented Facebook Connect on our site, allowing you to use your Facebook identity to log-on and post comments and for your Facebook friends to get told about those comments in their news feeds (when Gawker Media did this, user registrations were up by 45% and comments up by 16% compared to the previous week).

To really begin to see the potential for yourself, have a look at how The Insider is using it, JC Penney’s recent Beware of the Doghouse campaign or the early efforts from Vimeo, Brightkite and Eventbrite.

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Tribal DDB launched VW's new website today, which VW have spent millions on, and it's looking good. This follows on from AKQA's new site for Fiat back in July, which is similarly endowed with 3D & configurator goodness. Will all the other manufacturers be forced to follow suit? I think so…

Update: Vincent Thomé has the view from the inside of Tribal.

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Following on from my two posts on the subject of microsites last year, Andrew Walmsley has piled in:

They dilute brand equity and perform poorly in search. They might look attractive in a conventional advertising sense, but they frequently fail to deliver in digital terms.

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Graham Charlton:

It is vitally important for etailers to constantly monitor their websites, looking for ways to improve the user experience, with the aim of increasing conversion rates.

Read on.

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David Armano has an inspired rant against the flash microsite mindset:

There are literally millions of enthusiasts out there producing quality content in highly search engine friendly formats. Not only is much of their content easier to find on the Web – it's engaging, relevant, and the people who produce it actually talk back to us. It's time to wake up.

Read on.

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Elliott Smith on what could be an emerging trend in some web design circles, the use of full motion video as a background – a kind of moving desktop wallpaper, over which information is laid. Interesting to note Euro RSCG 4D used this approach with their recent 207 GTi site for Peugeot.

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A useful reminder from Jacob Nielsen that:

users visiting a new site spend an average of 30 seconds on the homepage and less than 2 minutes on the entire site before deciding to abandon it (they spend a bit more time if they decide to stay on a site, but still only 4 minutes on average).

He goes on to discuss the inevitable trade off between the number of features and a site's simplicity.

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Greg Kelton shares the benefits of his experience:

When it comes to creating effective website pages, less is often more. This realisation, as with many of the results of multivariable tests I run every day, is actually quite counter intuitive.

It’s very hard to resist the urge to fill every inch of the page copy in the hope that something will stick. In fact generally speaking, test results show that the opposite is true. Six points are normally better pared down to four or even three.

Information overload, as with people or computers, can cause shut down. Often I’ve found the simple removal of FAQs actually increases the conversion rate whereas “satisfaction guaranteed” is a consistently beneficial message.

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AKQA have just launched a new website for Fiat – an impressive 3D broadband experience, along with voiceovers and full screen video. So, does it stack up?

Well, although you'll have seen similar if you've been checking out car microsites, for example the Honda Civic's and the more recent (and awesome) one for the Nissan Qashqai, the Fiat site takes it several steps further by creating in an immersive experience close to Michelin's better mobility site, and is for Fiat's entire range rather than just a single model (although I have to say once you actually start looking in detail at a model the content is pretty light compared to most standalone model sites).

Contagious has more on the story. I imagine all car websites will look like this fairly soon (assuming the manufacturers have big enough wallets, which they do)…

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We all know building accessible websites is important, and that there's legislation* and corporate guidelines that enforce it. However, have you ever wondered what it's actually like for the target audience?

NMA interviewed a cross-section of disabled people to discover how digital media fit into their lives and how accessibility problems affect them.

Mark is 55 and has a son aged 15. He works with access technology for blind and partially sighted people at the Royal National Institute of the Blind. He is blind.

Brands that do it for me include Wetherspoon's, Dell, Sony and Nokia. I use a somewhat aged Nokia 6680 with a program on it called Talks [a screen reader for mobile text], which makes just about everything on it accessible to me. Even the camera is useful. I don't use it much myself, but I ask people to take pictures and then I can at least find named photos when I want to show them to others. My favourite sites are Dabs, Savastore, Expansys and the Official Census sites.

I mostly use the web for checking out and buying gadgets, downloading music and books, booking holidays, paying bills and for researching just about anything – all the things everyone else does, but it's ten times more valuable to me because I usually won't have any alternative way of doing it. I also need to check out for myself the many ways in which my son is keen to spend my money online.

I use Jaws, a screen reader that makes the computer speak in reasonable synthetic speech for the purposes of navigation. I don't use the mouse at all and control the whole thing from the keyboard, using a combination of Windows and Jaws keystrokes. The most useful thing I learned at school was touch-typing.

What annoys me are images with no text associated and registration procedures that end with the security requirement that you type in a string of characters, which are usually a graphic, so not identified by a screen reader.

The access technology alternatives are often purely token – an offer to contact you and complete the process manually, which doesn't in fact happen, or some poor-quality speech. I also find it annoying when, on a holiday site, the facilities in a resort or hotel get shown in a video clip or virtual tour. If I'm lucky, the only alternative I might find is a list of pictures from which I can deduce just the basic list of amenities.

To be fair, web designers still often don't realise there are people like me, using the stuff I have to, trying to get into their sites. If you take the trouble to give feedback, the response is usually at the very least interested, and sometimes there's real subsequent improvement.

Dean is 26 years old and works at Mencap as an accessible communications assistant. He also does stand-up comedy. He has a learning disability.

What annoys me are links saying the same thing, as I don't know which is the best to click on. Too much information can be overwhelming. I would prefer just important information that's easy to understand. When information is unclear it can stop someone from being independent.

Companies do listen but do they listen enough? I'd like them to approach me in a way that shows they're listening to what we say, and that they really do care for our needs.

Diane is a 24-year-old student living in Scotland. She is registered blind.

I have a Nokia phone with Talks on it. It's quite pricey to buy, though, and I only heard about it through word of mouth. I got the program free in a deal with Vodafone, but I think it has stopped doing it. On my PC I use Jaws.

I use the internet all the time, for studying and personal use. I use Google Scholar loads for my course and have both a Hotmail and a university email address. Hotmail can be difficult to use with a screen reader, though. You have to tab around a lot and it's jumpy, with tonnes of junk on it. I also watch a lot of digital TV. I have a digibox with an audio description facility, which is very good, but most programmes don't have audio description. There should be more available, at the cinema as well.

I love shopping for clothes but not, generally, online, because the descriptions can be so vague. If there was more information I'd definitely shop online more. Even if it says 'red skirt' that's no use – how long is the skirt? What kind of red is it? What shape?

I'm quite happy to use Tesco online to shop for food. Milk's milk, you don't need to know much else, although sometimes its cake descriptions can be a bit rubbish. I'm looking for a place to live at the moment and I'm surprised by how inaccessible lots of the housing sites are. For example, people with special needs can't search specifically on them. But this would be useful for more than just disabled people, like couples with young children who don't want stairs.

Companies should see talking to us as two-way communication, and realise that everyone's needs are different – there are lots of different kinds of disability.

*The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 made it a legal requirement for companies to provide fair access to their services for those with disabilities, including websites.

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