Summary

The World Wide Web started as a communication tool in the 80’s. By early 90’s, with the advent of the browser, the web became a publishing platform consisting of websites which were nothing more than online brochures. By the end of the 20th century in the late 90’s, the web morphed into a transaction platform in which some websites became online stores. More than just communicating and publishing, web users were transacting at that time, which marked the beginning of the monetization of the web.

Nowadays, a decade later, the web became an application platform supporting all types of applications from enterprise applications to games. This evolution led to the rise of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) under the Application Service Provider (ASP) model. However, despite this rapid growth of the usage of the web both in volume and diversity of usage, user experience of websites and web applications suffered first due to lack of broadband, and second by the limitations of the browser and HTML.

With the advent of new tools such as HTML 5 and the adoption of new Rich Interactive Application (RIA) frameworks such as Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight, it is time to revamp the web.

This white paper proposes to strengthen the architecture of future websites by adopting five fundamental architectures, namely:

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Information Architecture that supports a collage of content coming from different sources in a collaborative and corroborative manner, a truly multimedia content, and a flexible taxonomy. While Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical for achieving visibility on the web, crawlability, searchability, and indexation should not compromise usability. In other words, finding something that turns out to be not so usable is actually useless.

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Functional Architecture that supports at least the most common functions including security (register and login), discovery (search and browse), social (share, refer, rate, review, note, tag, bookmark, favorite, and embed), commerce (order, pay, reserve, and track), Communications (e-mail, telephone, chat, post, and blog), contacts (rolodex, locations, maps, and directions), assistance (help, tutor, and wizard), and personalization (settings). Functions should be grouped together based on common criteria or properties and should be placed in toolbars similar to desktop applications.

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Navigation Architecture that supports a comprehensive website map that can be accessed using different views such as accordion, drop-down-menus, tree, or thumbnails. Such navigation system must be able to handle different types of hierarchical structures of websites – from the very flat to the very deep ones. Similarly, lists are better accessed using parent-child windows which increase productivity and usability. Furthermore, the usage of Rich Interactive Components (RIC) such as the accordion, carousel, docks, wheels, and walls are all necessary to offer an intuitive and pleasant navigation experience.

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Interface Architecture that supports Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) which are highly attractive, interactive, collaborative, immersive, and engaging. Such Gus offer a very rich user experience that satisfies the values of the brand of the publisher of the website.

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System Architecture that offers industrial robustness by providing scalability, reusability, flexibility, manageability, maintainability, multi-threading, load balancing, fault-tolerance, recovery, security, internationalization, etc.