The self-evolving website
March 6th, 2009, By Ovi Demetrian Jr
An idea I’ve been thinking about for a while now is self-evolving web design. The self-evolving website would be a combination between having dynamic database-driven content and something similar to smartphone technology where the presentation of content changes based on specific user interaction. It’s difficult to really describe at this point, so I figured I would just go through a few examples I had in mind:
- Dynamic website layout - Designing a website’s interface in a way it could evolve with user interaction kept in mind. The design would start out as more neutral and based on click-throughs of different portions of the design, portions with more traffic will begin to become more prominent in the design.
- Keyword-specific content - Visitors that came to the website through search engine results would get different content featured to them from the keywords they search for. The keywords will be referred to as the user browses through the website, showing relevant content like related blog posts in the site’s blog section.
- Visitor interaction tracking – Based on how a particular visitor browses a site, the series of pages that are visited are kept track of and content is generated dynamically from that data. The site will essentially try to guess what the visitor is looking for by showing them related content the deeper the user goes into the site.
Again these ideas are in the conceptual stage. There are obviously a lot of different aspects that need to be taken into consideration to make them work. I really think that websites are starting to head in this direction already though. This is due mainly to the blog format being used in more advanced ways as more people have become familiarized with it. The idea of ‘content is king’ is being taken to the next level when it comes to how websites are designed.
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