Google are talking big. They believe that Wave offers a ground-up reinvention of the way that people communicate and collaborate online. Google Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen, defined Wave as “A single shared space where two or more users can exchange real time dialogue, photos, videos, maps and documents in what we call a Wave. Everyone can reply to a Wave, people can come and go and you can drag and drop information from all over the web.”

Superficially resembling email, the software is essentially an amalgamation of email, real time chat (you might already use the Gmail chat function) and micro-blogging type functionality all under one bonnet with search a focal point of its interface. Its searches are based on keywords, activity, history, person, and more that helps users manage their experience effectively. When it comes to storing wave conversations it’s done much in the same way as it is in email using folders like archived, starred, inbox, and trash.

Communications are based on Waves and though working in a similar way to email or IM, there is a great deal more flexibility with users able to edit the messages of anybody within your wave, much like a Wiki, with edits highlighted and attributed. Conversations are threaded and easier to follow. They are also richer in the sense that it is easy to drag and drop images and attachments as well as add new contributors. Perfect for collaborative work.

Google seems keen that Wave benefits from the full ingenuity and input of developers world wide and has made the system Open Source, also inviting developers to build extensions using open APIs. Robot Plugins and applications will enable a virtually unlimited range of features such as contextual spell checking and live translation. Tweety integration for example lets you sign in to Twitter, read tweets from your friends and post a new tweet directly from Wave – a Twave.

Of course at the moment the main interest in Waves is mainly within tech communities who are reviewing it, largely favourable in beta. The acid test will be whether the system proves useful enough to shift users from their existing tools. Whether it is adopted on a mass scale. Judging from Google’s popularity and its successes to date it would take a brave person to bet against them.

A micro site will stand alone, enjoying a unique URL, domain and offering. They allow you to measure, experiment and to attract a targeted and highly appropriate audience. Measurable and flexible campaigns act as testing grounds that enable you to quickly identify effective techniques and campaign tactics through A/B comparisons and other testing.

Maybe you want to run a tight, light one-off marketing campaign – campaign that relates to your core business but isn’t necessarily everything you represent and all that you do – a new product launch perhaps, a time limited promotion, a competition, a special edition or limited release. All of these exciting marketing campaigns lend themselves perfectly to a micro site. The SEO benefits of well-planned web marketing campaigns and micro site development are significant.

Conceptually focused, themed websites with lots of freshly generated content stand every chance of ranking extremely highly within their targeted niche. They also have every opportunity of converting. With 50% of website visitors venturing no further than the home page a powerful micro site landing page, packed with relevance and juicy calls to action has the real potential to rock your web.

What’s more, in addition to attracting highly focused traffic in their own right through natural searches, PPC and often plenty of offline promotion (a bottle label or packet might read something like – ‘visit the special promotion website for your unique discount code’) micro sites act as the opening of your online marketing funnel. They qualify visitors in their own right but also for your main site and can feed them through to your core propositions.

Search engines as well as human visitors absolutely love them. High impact, low cost and popular micro sites also generate additional authority through link juice to your main site. Improve the PageRank and search engine positioning of your main site with the help of micro sites and feel the benefits across the whole of your Internet presence.

For advice on how to most profitably integrate a micro site campaign in to your online marketing talk to an SEO professional.

Unfortunately not everyone has the time to sit down and spend hours researching modern website building techniques, and if you’re not a particularly technically minded person in the first place, you may not have a clue where to start!

The following collection of words constitutes a quick overview of, what I feel are probably the most important web development considerations for any sales driven website. You can use this as a brief check list of things a modern website should have implemented if you are considering an update, or simply bookmark it as a reference for later dates.

Performance

In my eyes, site performance is one of the most important but commonly neglected development considerations. The evolution of the internet is seeing websites sites getting more complicated and the responsibility of ensuring performance falls squarely on the shoulders of the developers.

Your websites performance is vitally important; if the user gets bored or cant find what they want whilst browsing your site they will leave and probably won’t come back impacting your sales figures. If your site is slow my first suggestion is that you speak to whoever manages your website about implementing some speed fixes.

On the other hand, if you want to try and iron things out yourself Yahoo provides a great place to start. The Yahoo ‘ySlow’ tool tests and evaluates your website’s performance then tells you what you need to do to improve it. The tool is available free as a fire fox add on from http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/.

Usability

What would you do if you found a website that was annoying to use?

A user friendly site is a must when it comes to keeping customers interested. A ‘user-friendly’ site is easy to navigate, has a good layout and contrast and most importantly portrays your message with minimal confusion and ambiguity.

Improving your website’s usability can involve changes from altering text colours and form layouts to a complete overhaul of the whole site. Usability is a massive subject and there exists many resources to help you and your site developers get your website up to scratch. If you are not sure whether your site is easy to use or not, get someone you know doesn’t often use a computer to traverse the pages for ten minutes and ask them how easy they find it to understand and navigate around your site.

Accessibility

This is how I think about accessibility: the more accessible your site is the larger your potential audience/customer base. A highly accessible website is a site which can be viewed, and made sense of, by anyone.

Here is an example: a partially sighted or blind user may need the option to view large text or a use screen reader to make sense of your site. In this case it is important to ensure that your websites support re-sizable text and can be read by a screen reader, or we can forget about getting any blind or partially sighted customers from our website.

On the other end of the scale ensuring accessibility for your audience may only require some sensible browser testing to ensure your users can see your site how it’s meant to be seen in their browser.

So whoever your target audience is, if you think you might be losing customers due to your sites accessibility you should talk to your site’s developer about getting some changes made.

Design

A good designer will find a balance between ‘flash’ and practical. While is it is important that your website looks good and is presented well you also need to get your message across and sell your products/services. For this reason e-commerce sites do not lend themselves to overly flashy/visual designs.

Design considerations also have a massive impact on the search engine compatibility of your website. Take for example a website designed and created using Adobe Flash. Flash content is not viewable by most search engines and they will simply find no information on your website to store in their databases, thus your site will suffer in terms of rankings in search engine indices. On the other hand a well formatted website designed to provide search engines with lots of juicy content to index will perform much better, bringing in more visitors and more potential for conversions!