I recently stumbled across the new Modernista! website whilst doing a spot of research on some of our peers and competitors.
At first I thought that the site was simply a great gimmick – a smart way for the agency to show how 2.0 savvy they are. But then a thought struck me – this was leading somewhere that no digital agency wants to go: The death of the website. Why should clients pay money for domain hosting, servers and a CMS when, as Modernista show, you can get it all for free via a series of ready-made web applications?
As our technologies become more sophisticated our audiences’ knowledge of how to use the web does too. It is common place today to look up companies on Wikipedia, check references on LinkedIn and view media via the likes of Flickr and YouTube. In fact it could be argued that Modernista don’t even really need the crude navigation system that they have bolted over the top at all. The web is a huge library for anyone with access to use, a keyword search on Google brings back most of the information you need within a page or two.
So if an ad agency does not need a website anymore can we still justify that our clients do? OK Banks and large Retailers still need bespoke applications for ecommerce and safe transactions but I wonder how long it might be before there are ready-made versions of their apps that we can all use in the same way.
I guess that if this is the trend, the mantra ‘content is king’ rings truer than ever?
Tags: ad agency, content, death of the website, Design, modernista, web 2.0, web design, websites
May 2, 2009 at 6:33 pm |
[...] for the guys and girls at Modernist and would be the perfect accompaniment to their web presence [see earlier ramblings on their site]. For if you no longer need a website per se, it stands to reason that your corporate stationary [...]
June 3, 2009 at 12:04 pm |
[...] By alex osman The team at Boone Oakley have taken the Modernista [see "The website is dead!"] concept a step further. Instead of distributing their company information across a number of [...]