I saw a headline the other day in someone else’s newspaper: Days of Static Website Over. Not that I was on the bus and read the headline from several yards away and didn’t read the article at all.
My first thought was, you’re a few years late there, Mr. Reporter!
My second thought was, this bus is making me sick.
My third thought was, no they’re not! (the days of static websites, I mean. The bus was in fact making me ill.)
Evolution doesn’t abandon the root when new scions sprout. Just because a new mutation is successful doesn’t mean its progenitor disappears, even if the new mutation is better in all or most functional ways. For you creationists who don’t get science, that’s why chimps are still here.
The chimps of today are not like the chimps of three million years ago, however. Though today’s poo-flingers are not separate species from their prehistoric ancestors in the way that humans are separate species from the chimps, they have evolved.
Enough with hairy banana-munchers. Next analogy:
Television didn’t kill the billboard, but it did influence it. For the fixed billboard to compete with the moving picture of TV, it had to adapt. The billboard had to find ways within the constraints of its technology to compete with video. In recent years, billboards have merged somewhat with video technology, but I’m not talking about that for the moment.
I’m talking about changes in artistic design that allowed fixed image billboards to take better advantage of their physical placement than they had before, and thus compete with television for advertising dollars.
The static website is not dead. Like the billboard and the chimpanzee, it evolves within its technological constraints to compete with its evolutionary descendants.
How does an older technology evolve to compete with its scion?
The first step is to consider what it is about the mutation that gives it the competitive evolutionary advantage which spurned its speciation.
In the case of television and billboards, there was the newness of TV, a sort of frontier effect, and the way it handles the attention of its viewers. By “frontier effect,” I don’t mean to say that people are still wowed by television all these decades later. TV is a broadcast medium, which is a term I’m using loosely. Other than changing the channel, the supplier decides what the consumer gets. In this respect, it is similar to newspaper, billboards, and radio. It is different from a demand medium, like the World Wide Web.
Anyway, within that group of supplier-decided media, TV is the most advanced and usually the most expensive, hence being a sort of frontier.
Billboards can’t compete on those grounds; but they can look at the effect TV has on its viewers, how it achieves its efficacy as an advertising medium, and what doesn’t work for TV. Then the billboard advertiser can see if there’s a way to be efficacious within the billboard’s limits and also by exploiting the differences between the two media.
The billboard advertiser asks, “How does the TV viewer feel when TV is effective, and how can I find a route to that? And what fails on TV that ay work here?”
Billboards are redesigned, advanced technologically in their own way (sometimes hybridizing with video but usually not), and made culturally relevant. Further, opportunities better suited to billboards (e.g. Restaurant and gas, next exit, 1 km ahead) are discovered, focused on, and exploited.
These same strategies apply to the Internet. Some older Internet technologies have been largely shut down and are considered deprecated (gopher, archie, UseNet). Their content or functions have been subsumed within the World Wide Web.
Within the Web itself, there are large media-like variations in technology. There are static websites, which could be called demand-broadcast. Like movies on demand on cable TV, these sites are not interactive but they are specifically available to be chosen at user-convenient times. There are dynamic websites that modify content or structure to suit user preferences, and may even process user input. There are social sites (Facebook), fully interactive sites (browser games, for example), aggregate sites that pull their content from a variety of sources as the content develops (Digg), virtual and immersive worlds, and many other variations.
But none of the advanced websites completely obviates its evolutionary ancestors. A law firm’s virtual office in Second Life does not negate the usefulness or necessity of its practice-area blog that collects dynamic content from multiple sources. The blog and aggregator site does not render useless the static website listing contact, firm history, and practice information.
Being static doesn’t mean there are no dynamic elements – a static site may have drop-down lists, contact forms, etc. Being static definitely doesn’t mean it should look like a 1998 Geocities visual assault any more than a 2010 billboard should (unironically) take design cues from a 1950s futurist aesthetic.
The static website must evolve to compete with newer technologies, but it doesn’t have to become them or die. It should take design (including information architecture) cues that appeal to the market that is accustomed to dynamic sites; the market views web information differently from how it did ten years ago. From where the eye goes on the screen to relationships between information to site hierarchy, design has changed. But none of this means that your firm site needs a news aggregator, a Twitter feed, or a user-selectable colour scheme.
Monkeys co-exist with their own evolutionary offshoots; so can static websites, as long as they don’t forget to evolve too.
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