Large websites have a very difficult time changing with the times. They trap valuable content deep within them and by their hierarchical nature over time bury the content no matter how well a site is organized.
I think you need to separate the content from the publishing. Social media shows us the first baby steps of how to do this. Content needs to be topical and timely and most of all in the places that people visit most. Government needs to concentrate on creating great content and then distributing it in as many possible ways in the network. Use social media, websites, blogs, mobile applications, groups, comment forums. Wherever the conversation is happening online that is where government needs to publish the content and add to the cultural discourse. Websites are good for storing information but poor at distribution.
You cannot do everything, so build simple websites with great Q&A and search. Spend most of your effort on a getting your content into the network channels and communities who are having the real conversation which aren't heard in washington.
Comments (6)
@kaushikp - I like that you are coming at this from a different perspective. "Websites are good for storing information but poor at distribution" is a good statement. I wonder if you could unpack the "large websites" term a bit. In your model, where the website really serves as a container which people primarily access via other channels, it doesn't seem to disqualify sites with a lot of content as much as overly complicated sites.
Essentially there seem to be two issues here: one of architecture and one of content marketing.
Websites are the backbone of the web network so far. Website should have tons of well categorized content. Web pages allow content to have a form and allow content to be easily distributed. What is key is to not expect people to have to do the work of navigating these complex navigation structures to find that content. Curation is an important part of making sites work and also of distributing timely and contextual content. If people know what they want then the search on a site should be optimized. If people are not sure what they want then curation needs to be optimized to allow as many different ways into the content. Once content is curated it can be distributed across the network. This all requires a very different skill set for developing websites than the current model. Luckily a generation of young people are being raised on social networks which are basically teaching them to how to curate links and content and distributing those ideas far and wide in a timely and sometimes compelling way.
The content has to stop being one big chunk of text (i.e., the web page), and instead be pieces of data that we assemble into pages when we need to, in whatever way is useful at the time. And the content/data needs metadata to help people find, sort, and reuse it.
@kaushikp I agree with you in concept, but I think we need to think beyond "websites." Yes, they are valuable and will continue to have value. But the gem of your idea has to do with separation of content (which is data) from presentation. If you have searchable content, it can be on a website or another type of store and be published in almost any format. Not just a web "page" on web "sites."
Big websites are a bad idea for the most part. But content in context is important. Lots of bits of data do not deliver a message or tell a story. People are not machines, they need to be presented with narratives. While selling TV shows on twitter and facebook is fine because they are backed by multi million dollar marketing campaigns to deliver context. If you don't have that then you have to tell the whole story online which means setting context. Dynamically assembling content makes sense, but that requires curation or a smarted context engine.
@kaushikp I may be using "data" in a confusing way.
In the old days, we would hand-code the entire page, and it's all just one big chunk of text. That leads to sites being hard to change (you have to edit each page), and the valuable content being trapped, as you say.
If we treat the content as data, instead of marking up a whole page as one chunk, we have a small piece that's the title of the article, and another small piece of content/data that's the author, another that's the posting date, another might be the body of the article, and so on. If these pieces are tagged in the right way by the content creator, then it's easy to restructure the site, or extract just the parts you want for some other purpose. (Like a smaller special-purpose site.) Tags should help with curation as well.
I think the government still has lots of sites that are just big chunks of text.