Next-gen architecture is about three key elements: social media, content, and accessibility. All designed for people, not robots.The overall consensus as that there was lots of room for brand to improve their mobile presence, and we should expect to see more attention, bigger budgets, and lots of resources allocated to this area in the next few years. Thus, the need to design and deploy a next-generation site architecture that maximizes your chances of findability, no matter where and how searchers look for you, is one of the hottest topics in the evolving mobile and multi-device world. So how can you build a site that addresses current and future cross-media challenges?
According to Patrick Branigan (@pbranigan), Art Director/Lead Designer, Overit, there are a range of things to consider as you plan your new cutting edge digital presence. First things first, we need to define what we mean by architecture:
  • Real world/traditional architecture: buildings and skyscrapers and airports – that sort of thing.
  • Informational architecture: Creating the structure of concepts and data.
  • Digital realm architecture: This is the actual design of digital services and experiences.

Now that we’ve established what kind of architecture we’re talking about here – digital realm architecture – Branigan defines what architecture isn’t:

  • A list of pages, or a site map.
  • Static information that doesn’t change or reflect user interaction, device, or other forms of potential impact on experience.

Branigan defines true next generation architecture as the design of ecosystems that incorporate at a deep level the sharing and conversations will drive user engagement in this new era. Users need to both converse with as well as to organize content as they see fit. Architecture must encourage sharing, conversation, and engagement.

Branigan mentiones the much-hyped New York Times new article template (still being rolled out on all platforms) – as an example of this. If the user clicks the comments icon the template places the user discussion right alongside the article content as seen below – no need to scroll to the bottom of the page:

ny-times-article-template

On the other hand, site architecture needs connected Google+ profiles to benefit from social authority. It’s easy to do, just follow the instructions for adding the rel=author tag.

Regarding Fonts, Branigan emphasizes the use of webfonts to ensure your copy renders correctly in various contexts and looks cool and unique. Reference them in your CSS to call the Google library of Webfonts. Next gen site architecture needs compelling fonts that stick out from the pack and address live text and crawlabilility. You no longer need to use images to render unique-looking text – this helps SEO and indexabililty, copy and pasteability, and sharing.

In addition, next-gen architecture follows best practices around images and videos:

  • Always use alt text, descriptive image file names, and reduce image size or make responsive so the right image is sent to the right device (responsive design basics).
  • Same with videos – focus on delivery (HTML 5) and ease of sharing and viewing on various devices.

The famous Snow Fall article on NYTimes.com is a great example of site architecture the follows all the above tactics – check it out:

snow-fall-avalanche-at-tunnel-creek-ny-times

But something stands out from the rest: Responsive Design, instead of Dynamic serving (same URL, different HTML via device detection on server) or Mobile sites ( totally separate site and URL).

Responsive design means using the same HTML, the same URL, and different CSS. It has certain benefits – accessibility, a single URL, no redirection, and it may save resources for site and crawlers.However, responsive design takes time effort and money and has some downsides. So how do you know if you should invest in responsive design? Branigan says that if you have a significant percentage of traffic from mobile devices, if you have high bounce rates from mobile-referred traffic, and your competitors have sites that work well on multiple devices, you should definitely consider it.

In the early days, it was all desktops and luggable portables. Everyone was sitting at desks. Nowadays it’s all sorts of devices, and people are not at desks – they are in all sorts of contexts: Reading Kindles, waling and looking at smartphones (into oncoming traffic), browsing tablets, laptops, big screen rigs, TVs, Xboxes, Google Glass, etc. As Bryson Meunier (@brysonmeunier), Director, Content Solutions, Resolution Media mentions:

  • 90 percent of media consumption is screen based
  • 38 percent of media consumption is on smartphones (according toGoogle)
  • 27 percent of Google searches are on mobile devices
  • 6 percent of Bing searches are on mobile. Big is different in demographics here.

Outside the U.S. and in many other countries mobile is the dominant way to access Internet – often not even via smartphones («features phones» with limited browsers are popular in India).Adding to the importance of mobile, the Kelsey research group says mobile will exceed desktop search in 2015.

Google’s official policy is that responsive web design is preferred if it’s the right solution for your user. Follow the best practice for your users, as Google can handle dynamic serving (vary HTTP headers) as well as Mobile Sites (more use should be made of switchboard tags on mobile URLs to avoids a potential cloaking issue for showing different content to different devices; and do not block Googlebot from mobile sites, as blocking bots from a mobile site is a dated strategy and can actual hurt you when users search for a mobile version of your site). So, the question is if Responsive Design is Best for Your Users and the way to answer it is considering these points, as Responsive isn’t the be all and end all:

  • Are mobile users well served by current site architecture? Check your mobile keyword visibility. Prioritize keywords based on volume, desktop, mobile, and total priority and check rankings. Create platform-specific content – Android content for Android phones. Don’t ask people to print out coupons shown on phone.
  • Know your mobile keywords and their volume – prioritize and check rankings. Local intent keywords are mostly mobile, so you need mobile landing pages for these queries.
  • 90 percent of «bars» (places that serve drinks) keywords come from mobile devices.
  • Sometimes apps are the best choice (i.e., the Google Now app) – people spend a lot of time on apps and it’s growing, much more than mobile web.
  • Feature phone users – outside the most developed countries, are dominant – 158 million visitors used opera (the major feature phone browser) in 2012 – do you want to ignore them?
  • Speed is important to mobile users, and responsive design can slow sites down. It’s unlikely to outperform a dedicate m. site.

In any case, what it is key for every company is to understand that the most profitable investment to improve the client funnel and balance acquisition and retention is the one made to optimize the creation, management and distribution of the company content, being obviously its sites the most relevant elements to begin with.