Geoff Bock provides a useful look at what firms need to do to make their Web sites relevant to today’s Web users with is article, Beyond the Web page: Broader Web strategy a must for business success. He sees 2011 at the end of Page-oriented Web sites. Geoff notes, “enterprises can no longer afford to maintain their digital presences simply as collections of Web pages designed for full-screen browsing.” This is because “we now expect a level of interactivity and immediacy in our digital experience that far outstrips the capabilities of the page-oriented Web to deliver.”
So what needs to be done? Geoff suggests that we start with the customer experience and work out from there. This is always a wise move. Start with business use cases and not the tools. One way to do this is to get more granular with your content segmentation. Geoff suggests offers some examples: a “news article,” a “music album,” a “marketing plan” and an “instructional video.” These provide a more business oriented approach and set the stage for the required metadata. For example, a news article is a text file and has such fields as “headline,” “byline,” “body,” “image” and “subject keyword.” A music album is an audio file and has such fields as “title,” “artist” and “genre.”
This makes a lot of sense and opens up many possibilities including common elements across content types such as byline for a new article and artist for a music album. Getting the right level of granularity for metadata is one key element for a successful content strategy. You need to make content accessible and targeted for search engines and people. You also need to set content for the semantic Web by making it understandable to machines. Geoff sets some of the conditions for making the Semantic web work.
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