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A Look Back at the B2B Web in 2007 and a Look Ahead to 2008

Another year has come to a close. 2007 was pretty exciting in both the B2C and B2B space on the web, as community, sharing, and using the web to find information became commonplace. On the tail of B2C sites like YouTube, Flickr, and iTunes, the B2B audience started to demand video, image and audio information. Posting only a blurb of text about an event, service or product is no longer acceptable. The B2B audience wants to see and hear to make their own observations from as much raw information as possible. Many B2B news and information websites met this need by introducing video sections, posting regular podcasts, blogging and increasing the visual information included in stories. In 2008 this will extend to B2B websites themselves, as manufacturers and service providers increase the range of information they include on their sites.

Community has been big on the web for a couple of years now and most Internet users are comfortable with instant messaging (IM), boards, blogs and sharing information. With the emergence of sites like Digg, people now have the opportunity to share links and comments to stories. B2B sites have embraced this by including more forums and adding the ability to comment right on stories. Look to see this increase in 2008 to include more B2B user generated content, such as reviews and sharing capabilities on websites.

Customer-centric will be the name of the game in 2008 as the B2B audience becomes accustomed to customer-centric sites in the B2C world. Social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have hit the news in 2007, and the buzz has started for these to be big topics for B2B in 2008. The B2B audience in 2008 will demand more user-generated content with the ability to connect and share information.

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B2B Website Usability – Does It Work? Update

It’s now been 2.5 months since the redesign of our flagship publication website. In B2B Website Usability – Does It Work? I reported:

The average weekly visits have increased 34%, average weekly page views have increased 23% and average weekly visitors have increased 36%.

Traffic has been continuing to grow every week since the launch. The publication staff posts a new issue every week, plus web-only content in blogs, video and web-exclusive articles. Since launch there has been a 80% increase in weekly visits, 40% increase in weekly page views, and 90% increase in weekly visitors. The numbers for monthly stats are very similar: 75% increase in visits, 45% increase in page views, and 85% increase in visitors. The publication is continuing to promote their new online content, and we’ve started running Google AdSense ads to promote specific parts of the site.

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B2B Design – The Need for Whitespace

Too often I come across websites or clients who want to get as much as they possibly can into the smallest possible space. They think that makes their site look trendy and up-to-date.

The problem is that the human mind processes text in a certain way – it actually uses the shapes of words and the contrast between white space and “ink” to figure out what’s going on. When you bring up a webpage, you actually scan it starting at the top left to right and then move down and then left to right again – very similar to how we read words on a sheet of paper.

Good design takes advantage of these natural tendencies by balancing colors, text, and, very importantly, whitespace. This is called negative space in the traditional design world and it is just as important as what you put on a page or canvas (or space, etc.). So when you layout your website design, keep in mind that whitespace is important and you need to space things out a bit just so people can get a handle on what you’re trying to convey. If you don’t, they’ll just go somewhere else that is easier to understand.

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