Design Philosophy and Principles

All my CMS websites, including this one, are designed around the theory of information aggregation and 'b-webs'. These are ideas from clever people, relating to the study of information consumption, to produce e-business models.

A successful online presence requires a successful business to adapt to genuinely global markets, maximising its presence and re-organising its output to meet the varying needs of visitors, customers and clients.

This applies to business and websites of all sizes - it's no longer enough to have a nice looking website that sits online, waiting for relevant searches. Your site should often propogate itself into other websites to maximise visibility. Fact.

Your business should let your clients and partners break up your content into small, manageable chunks, view it how and where they like, and even share it using their preferred method, such as web, email, rss news feeds, social or other.

Even more, information from elsewhere should be easily added to your own services. News websites often use this technique to get as many sources as possible. For example, your website may appear as a news source for another site.

Web 2.0 and mashups are popular buzzwords but simply refer to 'b-webs' and aggregated-information technology. Lots of designers don't fully understand where these ideas came from and cannot see or extract their real value.

Web design companies should understand the concepts of value added services and coopetition, as they themselves often use a plethora of methods to be seen online and include offers and services of others, to improve the value of their own.

A good example of coopetition would be seeing iTunes on Windows, or Microsoft Office on Mac.

Your website must represent your business process online in a way that's easily manageable and accessible to your target markets, but that's not enough. To compete online, you must know others who can add value to your website.

My websites have a powerful plugin manager, so you can integrate the webs best content, services and tools into your own website. I can do this for you, or if you have some HTML experience, you can do it yourself in the admin panel.

Purchase a website and know that your site has been designed to maximise your outreach, flexibility and value for money. Download this MIT paper or read more about Digital Capital, from the Harvard Business School.