I’ve recently been struggling a bit with explaining why I think an organisation’s web presence need not be concentrated onto one ‘front page’, and this analogy is the best I’ve come up with so far.

A large public park may have any number of entrances, but it will usually have a main one. Often this main entrance will contain a reception desk, or even a visitors’ centre, where you can find out all about the park and its features. These may include its history, its opening times and the location of ponds, picnic areas and any branded franchises (such as coffee shops or cafes).

However, many visitors to the park will enter through different entrances. Therefore in order to find their way around they need to be given clear and appropriate signs (too much signage, for example, will distract and confuse them, and will quite likely spoil the nature of the park).

Each feature could be moved somewhere else and nothing about it would suggest it had ever had a connection with the park; it is the design of the park itself that gives them that clear context.

And so it is, I think, with an organisation’s web presence. It may include a number of different projects, but these needn’t all be vying for place on a front page. Indeed, the front page should be clear about its purpose and able to help visitors get to the bits that are of interest to them; it shouldn’t be choking under the weight of every aspect of the organisation’s work. And it shouldn’t be promoting something simply because someone thinks that putting it on the front page will magically do their communications work for them: it won’t; in fact, if everyone did that (and they often do) it would probably only serve to dilute it.

Each piece of an organisation’s work should concentrate on achieving its own goals and reaching its own audiences (firmly in the context of the broader organisational strategy, of course); the larger web presence – or, rather, the strategic collection of the organisation’s elements on the internet – should be managed in such a way that each of these disparate elements are recognisable within it and are enabled to flourish.

That’s all great in theory; currently I don’t do any of this very well in practice (but I’m trying). I thought I’d post it anyway though, in case the park analogy is useful to anyone else.

Update

Just to make it clear, I’m not advocating silos. A branch of an organisation needs to have the freedom and flexibility to meet its own strategic goals, but it must also allow visitors easily to navigate and make sense of the organisation’s work as a whole.

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I’m not actually going to try and explain what RSS is (or equivalents such as Atom), because it’s a bit technical and has a confusing history complicated by politics.

Instead I’m going to try explaining what a feed reader does, using an analogical story. I welcome feedback on the usefulness of this.

—
Once upon a time there was a vast lake, dense with fish. There were millions of them – of many different species, shapes, colours and sizes – and thousands of new fish appeared every minute.

Each day huge numbers of people would dive into the lake to look at the fish. But many only wanted to see certain kinds: people interested in blue fish only wanted to see blue fish; people interested in red fish with a fin missing only wanted to see those; and so on.

Unfortunately there were just too many fish. People were missing the fish they wanted to see, and the fish themselves were not getting the attention they deserved.

Then one day a group of clever folk invented a special kind of diving goggles. These goggles could be set to display only those fish that met certain criteria. So people who only wanted to see blue fish could now do so with little trouble.

And because the goggles knew which fish the user liked, they could let them know of other fish that they might find interesting.

On top of that, the user could fine-tune the goggles to display exactly the fish they wanted to see (for example they could choose not to see Bob Bigfin, who was an annoying blue fish). They could also set the goggles to tell their friends automatically which fish they liked.

Of course, lots of people thought this was a great idea and started manufacturing their own goggles. Some gave theirs away free of charge, and some sold theirs with extra features.

And so everyone was able to find what they were looking for in the enormous lake, and discover new fish based on what they already liked.

And so it is with your feed reader: you can filter the web for what interests you. The difference is that you don’t have to swim around the lake: you see the results all in one place, without having to go back to a website or search engine.

All you need to do is give the feed reader the address for the feed, be it RSS or Atom (you may be given a number of options for different versions of both: don’t worry too much about which to choose, it won’t make much difference). The feed reader then does the rest for you:  it looks online and displays anything new almost as soon as it’s published.
—-

Could this be any use in explaining the virtues of using feeds?

Update

6 March 2009: I amended the story in line with the changes I incorporated over at We Share Stuff.

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