I think the business of website development is going through a major shift. With the power of current blog platforms and the ease with which they can be used as a valid alternative to traditional websites, I believe small web shops are going to have to adapt and/or specialize in something else or their business is dead meat.

In the good old days (about four years ago) you could build a website from the bottom up if you were talented enough or you had to pay someone to build a website for you. Fact is, many of those sites amount to little more than what we see on blogs today, but it was the only way to really get a decent, well branded web presence. There were some do it yourself type of website tools with templates you could choose from, but by and large if you were serious about being online you didn’t go that route.

That’s not the case anymore. Blog platforms can be customized beautifully these days with a fraction of the development time and cost because the entire backend of the site is already done. That’s a huge shift for the web design business because traditional shops (and I’ve worked for and with some) would have their own code set for building sites or they would start from scratch. Customers got charged like crazy for sites that would really be no big deal in this day and age. The worst part is not everyone knows this and some web shops are still selling their services like always.

All I’m saying here is that it’s no longer necessary to look only to a web design firm to build your web presence. My friend Cory Miller began a venture a while back to start building on Wordpress and selling the designs so he can deliver an entire web presence on a platform he didn’t have to build. You can check it out at iThemes.com and you’ll see the designs are really sharp. Nathan Moore and the Anthology Creative crew did my blog on Wordpress and I love it. It’s clean, simple, gives me everything I could want, and it’s a full website that covers everything I need.

This web development shift is great for customers. They are generally better looking sites that are easy to manage and much cheaper than what some companies charge.

If this feels a little too doom and gloom for the web designers then you’re not seeing the opportunities. I actually think the future is bright in the web design/development world if they adapt to the changes or become specialized. Here are three areas that seem wide open for growth:

• Blog Design Specialists: Blogs have emerged as a great platform for a web presence that meets the needs of what many people want when they think about getting a website. The web designers who are focused on providing a great web presence with a focus on ease of use, function, and beauty will do well. Their counterparts building sites the old way, however, will still be charging clients to use some bulky, proprietary stuff their company is married to.
• The Flash/Controlled Media Specialists: Some people want to control the entire online experience for users and Flash or some other controlled online media like that is always going to be a preference for those people. Blogs won’t cut it in that regard and the specialists who can do this well will likely be in demand for a long time.
• The Big, Bad, Complex Website Specialist: There are some websites that are just too big and bad to warrant being built on a blog platform. You’re not going to see Amazon.com or anything like that switching over to a blog so there will always be a need for the large and highly complex site specialists.

I should note if anyone is wondering…I don’t build websites. I know enough HTML to get into trouble and  my design skills are mediocre at best. This entire perspective is based on the opportunities for consumers and my observations about how the market is changing. It’s as simple as this: the days of paying more than five or ten thousand dollars for a website are gone except in some select scenarios. In many cases you can get more than enough for what you need for under $1000. Just be aware of that next you want a website.

I spent some time on Google Trends today as I was thinking about web 2.0 tools for marketing compared to traditional marketing methods. You may recall I consider traditional promotion strategies the big fish of marketing (and I advocate going after the far more numerous small and medium size fish.) In my first test I compared direct mail, tv ads, billboards, and radio advertising.

One note about Google Trends before we proceed…this is just showing the relative quantity of Google searches on the given search terms. It may be easy to dismiss this but as Steve Rubel said in this post, “search engines show us what’s on everyone’s mind,” and it’s therefore interesting to note the trends of the collective thinking.

Here’s what the trends show over the last four years in these traditional marketing areas:

What you see here is that all but billboards are down from four years ago. Direct mail seemed to fall slowly and then hold fairly even in 2007. TV ads appear to have the most dramatic swings. Incidentally, notice the spike in TV ads early each year. Those are Super Bowl commercial searches for sure. Radio was down a little but steady for the last four years, though clearly below the other three areas.

After I looked at these four areas I included the term “web 2.0″ to see if that mere term competed with these traditional mediums. Here’s what I found:

Web 2.0 really didn’t take off until late 2005. By early 2006 you see that it eclipses the four traditional terms and then clears them significantly through 2006 and 2007.

Just for fun I tried one more trend comparison by throwing “blogs” into the mix. I dropped radio ads from the comparison since it was at the bottom of the pile and here’s what I found:

With “blogs” included it makes everything else just look silly. I was actually surprised it was such a huge difference. More surprising to me was that it was higher even back in 2004. We know that there were less than six million blogs at most in 2004 so it’s a bit curious to me, but quite interesting.

So what can we derive from all of this? At the very least we know there are far more searches for “web 2.0″ and “blogs” than than any of the traditional marketing methods. Even if all those searches weren’t marketing related (and we know that’s the case), the phrase web 2.0 is a business, marketing, and technology term. We can discern that the collective marketing and business interests are greatly interested in web 2.0 from these trends and if that’s where they are, it’s reasonable to look more seriously at them if you still have doubts.

One final one for kicks if you’re interested. Who do you think wins in a match up of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Google, and blogs? See it here.

Tonight I found a legal pad I haven’t used since sometime in early 2006. This is the pad I used when I was first beginning to sort out a lot of the early web 2.0 stuff that I’d been reading about. One page in particular stuck out to me tonight because I’m a data dumper when I’m trying to sort things out. I think that’s why I love white boards. I can just put all of my random thoughts on it and then stand back and look at it to see how to make sense of the mess. That may sound strange but that’s the way I work. That’s what this particular page was that I found tonight so here are some notes from Winter/Spring 2006 in all their random glory:

Mass media verses mini media

Internet marketing:

• Web 2.0 - users more involved/active; personally engage; examples: blogs, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Technorati, Wikipedia, RSS
• Grassroots PR strategy

Not typical banner ads and email marketing strategy

Difference:

• OLD - You’re an outsider on a page
• NEW - You’re recommended

Buzz marketing
Word of mouth
Grassroots
Wired

To be effective the product must be good.

It’s gutsy, honest, and not always pretty - must be willing to hear bad news from people - the bright side is that it will make your product better if you actually listen to them

I had the chance to do the web 2.0 overview presentation to a group of marketing professionals today consisting mostly of graphic designers and copywriters (and I also said I’d give a shout out to Ben H. who asked if I would be blogging about the presentation).

The presentation always covers the good old “massive Volkswagon” (MASSVW) that I’ve written about previously. A recent addition to the presentation was a discussion on the shift in the marketing messaging due to web 2.0. Specifically, it breaks down into two areas: tone and brevity.

Tone: The shift in copy tone is informal, conversational and fun. Compare the following, two email marketing companies tell the public about themselves in very different ways. The first takes the traditional approach and the second takes the new approach:

About Lyris:
Lyris Technologies, a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey Corporation, is a pioneer in the email technology industry. Since 1994, the company has been at the forefront of developing world-class email marketing software and services, while maintaining a record of strong profitability and compound annual growth.

As the choice of more than 5,000 major corporations and growing businesses Lyris’ flagship product, Lyris ListManager, is one of the world’s best-selling software solutions for email marketing and deliverability, while Lyris ListHosting offers the same powerful capabilities in a convenient, on-demand web-based solution.

About Emma:
In late 2001, Will Weaver and Clint Smith (known in more familiar circles as Will and Clint, or the Tall One and the Not-So-Tall One), began researching the email marketing and communications field. The two had recently started a company they named Cold Feet Creative, and their intent was to apply their sense of style and interface design to a niche market where, against other, more complicated software applications, they might stand out. Email Marketing, with its TargetBlasters and Contact2000s and MailBaboons and MailBaboonTargetBlasters, would do nicely.

So they built a prototype and called it Emma. They liked the name “Emma” because it formed a nice and handy abbreviation of the phrase email marketing and because it brought with it an inherent human quality. It’s a real name - like Antoinette or Frederick, only shorter. And that was what these two gentlemen were after - a way to bring software to life, but not literally because the software might decide to begin lopping people’s heads off, or running out for sandwiches at extremely inopportune times.

Brevity: With many of the web 2.0 technologies, the opportunities to be verbose are simply not available many times because the technology won’t allow it. For instance, a Google Adword doesn’t allow more the 25 or 35 characters on a line. Many text messages don’t receive more than 160 characters and the popular micro messaging system Twitter doesn’t allow more than 140 characters per message. Word counts don’t apply in this new micro messaging shift, rather character counts (which includes each letter, number, space, and punctuation mark) are the new constraints on a message.

I recently pulled stats for some work we’re doing at White Post that cover the growth in blogs, online video, and MySpace. These are all really interesting and I’m going to let the numbers speak for themselves…for now anyway.

Worldwide Blog Growth (source: Technorati)
January 2004 – less than 2 million blogs
July 2004 – 3.5 million
January 2005 – 6 million
July 2005 – 12 million
January 2006 – 24 million
July 2006 – 50 million
October 2006 – 57 million

Worldwide Online Video Growth (source: ComScore via Reel Pop)
October 2005 – less than 25 million online video views per day
January 2006 – 125 million online video views per day
July 2006 – 700 million online video views per day

United States Online Video Viewers (sources: eMarketer; US Census Bureau via Business 2.0)
2003 – 52 million (32% of U.S. Internet users; 19% of population)
2004 – 69 million (41% of U.S. Internet users; 25% of population)
2005 – 89 million (51% of U.S. Internet users; 32% of population)
2006 – 107 million (60% of U.S. Internet users; 38% of population)
2007 projection – 123 million (67% of U.S. Internet users; 43% of population)
2008 projection – 137 million (73% of U.S. Internet users; 47% of population)

MySpace.com registered users (sources: MySpace, Blog Herald, Business Week via Joe Suh)
May 2004 – 2 million
April 2005 – 12 million
October 2005 – 33 million
January 2006 – 48 million
July 2006 – 90 million
November 2006 – 131 million
February 2007 – 160 million

The first video below is from a newscast from sometime in the 90s talking about this thing called “Internet”. We’ve come a long way since then. The second video is a great overview of web 2.0. It’s interesting to see these videos together to fully appreciate the rapid change over the last decade.

Web 1.0

Web 2.0

Links for the feed readers:
Web 1.0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n4fDgmrF3o
Web 2.0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

My friend Nathan recently sent me a link to an article from PC Magazine that says less than one-fifth of teenagers (13-17 year olds) use email to communicate with friends whereas 40% of adults ages 25-54 use email to communicate to friends. The preferred method of communication for a third of the teenagers studied was instant messaging. Only 11% of adults use instant messaging though.

Although this study isn’t surprising, it was fascinating to see more numbers about the use and adoption of instant messaging over email for the teens. We heard some big numbers about IM back in the summer from Rick Klau when he spoke about web 2.0 at a convention in August.

Tonight around 6:30 I was sitting at the kitchen table with my daughter and the phone rang. It was an automated telemarketing call and since we get those from time to time I was about hang up but the voice asked the question, “If you’re interested in finding out about a local church press ‘1′.” Since I’m in church marketing and this was my first church telemarketing call I had to see where it took me. The automated voice told me that “New Church (name changed to protect the guilty) is an exciting place for families with contemporary worship, a great children’s ministry, Bible based teaching and it’s in your local area.”

The voice never told me where in my local area this church is located but informed me that if I wanted more information about the church I could leave my name and mailing address at the conclusion of the message to receive further information by mail. The voice also told me that the information I would receive would guide me to the website where I could find out more about the church but it never told me what the actual URL for the church is (in case I was actually interested in finding out more about it now).

So here’s my question…what were the leaders at this church thinking when they chose telemarketing as their method of solicitation? Of anything they could have done they opted for one of the most notoriously disruptive devices known to mankind. People dislike this form of solicitation so much that there’s a National Do Not Call Registry. Is this a sign that we have officially reached the end of the road when it comes to good ideas on ways churches can promote themselves in their communities?

The fact of the matter is that people are so accustomed to the daily barrage of marketing messages that their filters are turned on almost all the time. Also, there are certain marketing methods that are simply viewed as obtrusive (like telemarketing calls and pop-up ads). With both of these things in mind it’s important for churches to be even more aware and strategic with their marketing methods. If anything, churches should aspire to be the most attentive toward people’s preferred methods of communication because the message of the church is so important that we should want to create as few secondary obstacles for people to overcome as possible. If someone is going to have an issue with a church (and we know there will be plenty) it shouldn’t be with their marketing. Let an unbeliever’s issues with a church be related to something of substance that can start them down a road toward a life changing decision.

I’m all for good church marketing. I do it every day with my job. Tonight, however, I was both challenged and disappointed. I was disappointed with this very bad church marketing idea and I was challenged to consider what constitutes good church marketing and what responsibilities a church may have with any promotional effort it makes.

I’m encouraged too. I’m encouraged by where I see things going. The new media (web 2.0) tools facilitate relationship building and allow churches who use them to engage people and establish connections through interactions. These new tools are some the best things permission marketing has to offer and I believe they will be responsible for some of the greatest strides churches can make to connect with people…especially people who don’t want telemarketing calls.

One thing I really like about connecting with people through blogging is that you build relationships that are mutually beneficial. One such relationship for me is with Jon Haarstad. Though we’ve never met and live thousands of miles away (he’s in Portland, Oregon while I’m in Nashville) we’ve traded numerous emails and exchanged a lot of ideas.

He recently sent me a link to a Pixel Acres blog post that dissects the visual elements of web 2.0 design. I recognized some of these elements in a previous post but didn’t go to the sheer depth or show examples like the Pixel Acres post. It’s certainly worth a look for anyone trying to understand web 2.0 better and for the experienced person it will just solidify a lot of things you’ve already observed. If you want to go all out on web 2.0 just do everything they outline here and you’ll be set for your beta launch in no time.

There are a lot of new MicroExplosion readers now from a few months ago so this post is a recap of something that has become a cornerstone of sorts for this blog. Back in August I posted the six categories of web 2.o. With my attention and focus on web 2.0 and subsequent attempts to explain it to people who are unfamiliar, I’ve come to realize that these six categories are about as good as anything out there (that I’m aware of) for getting a quick snapshot of what web 2.0 is (and isn’t).

If you’re interested in a lengthy explanation of web 2.0 you can find great information on Wikipedia’s entry. My six categories were an attempt to synthesize a broad topic into something that’s easy to remember for both explanation and application. In order to remember them I just think of a “massive Volkswagon” for the MASSVW acronym. Here are the categories:

• Mashups - sites using existing technologies for an entirely new purpose like WikiMapia.org. It takes the functions of a wiki and overlays it with Google Maps for an entirely new kind of map. You can see ProgrammableWeb.com for more mashups.
• Aggregators - A site or program that gathers data from multiple sources and organizes the information to present in a new, more streamlined or appropriate format. Digg.com is a top aggregator site. So is Slashdot for the more technical people. And of course our dearly beloved, Google (and any other search engine for that matter) are the mothers of all aggregators.
• Social Networking - Websites focusing on connecting people with other people directly like Facebook and MySpace.
• Social Media - User-generated content like blogs, Flickr, or Zooomr.
• Video - Online television such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Revver.
• Web Applications - online programs that can do virtually everything your existing software programs can do. Zoho for instance can replace your Microsoft Office programs. Google now has multiple applications that also compete with the old Microsoft Office programs including documents and spreadsheets to calendars.

From a marketing and promotion perspective there are three of these areas that will be of particular interest to you…the social networking, social media, and video categories. In fact, I’ve seen that most of the things I talk about tend to fall into one of those three areas.

In addition to the six categories there are four commonly used and implemented technologies within many of the web 2.o areas:

• RSS - Real Simple Syndication is a way for a people to essentially bring the content of a website to their browser rather than visiting the site to see that same information. A website or other technology that incorporates RSS creates a “feed” to everyone who has a feed reader on their browser and has accepted the feed.
• Wiki - A wiki is a website that allows users to easily add, remove,or otherwise edit the information on a common site. This technology is most commonly implemented where groups need a collaboration tool.
• Tags – A tag is a keyword or descriptive term associated with an item as a means of classification specific to a website. For instance, on the photo sharing site, Flickr.com, users who tag their photos “dogs” will all be grouped together for a search on dogs.
• AJAX – AJAX is technology incorporated into websites with the intent to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability.

Well, believe it or not, if you’ve read this whole thing you have a better understanding of web 2.0 than the average person. The real question now is what are you going to do with this? The good news about many of the things we talked about above is that there is little to no money needed on your part to begin participating and incorporating these tools into whatever you’re doing. So you’re a real estate agent? Ok, this stuff is for you…especially the social media. Work retail? Why don’t you let users begin to tag items on your website in whatever manner they want and also let them provide feedback about the products? You’ll learn a lot about their desires and needs through the process…as well as the best future products to offer them. Oh, you’re a pastor…ok, get your church on the social networking sites and use social media and video like crazy! You get the picture…whatever you do, there’s something in web 2.0 for you.