Web design for the long tail

9 July 2007

The long tail

In large organisations and corporations, you often have small or large teams of people working on a website. You might have a developer, a graphics design person and a number of content creators. We can think of that as the high- end, or 'head'. While you have lots and lots of people who make small simple websites on their own, this is the low-end, or 'long-tail'.

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(Picture by Hay Kranen)

If that made no sense, then the normal way to understand the 'long-tail' jargon is as the second half a of a normal distribution, as in this image. Imagine the y-axis being complexity of the website and the size of the team, while the x-axis is the quantity of websites. You see that green part represents the minority, teams making highly complex websites, while the yellow part represents the 'long-tail', i.e. individual people. There are many times more simple websites than complex ones.

Web design for the long tail

Most web frameworks such as Django are designed for the 'head', the team, where you have enough different skills and enough time to make the most of the framework. While at the long-tail, you have lots and lots of people who make small websites with quite limited features. Normally making the website is only a small part of their job, or is hobby, a vanity project or as voluntary work.

Often the optimal solution is to use an open source CMS like Drupal or Plone, even if it requires reading a little. However, most people do not do that, often these websites start out in HTML and then people add a few interactive elements over time when required, such as contact forms, surveys, guestbooks, and so on. Often these are of variable quality or filled with ads, security flaws or rely on a third-party server which might disappear one day.

I am going to be developing and looking out for 'best of breed' tools for these long tail websites. Eventually, I want to have a list to publish here, so do let me know the kinds of things you use on your webpages so I be sure to include that while researching.

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