Web 1.0 is all about presentation. There is a user, and the user is going to read what’s on the page. That’s the primary focus. This is where we start to see a major difference between Web 1.0 and Web 3.0.
In Web 3.0, personalization, customization, and context start to matter. What you put on a webpage isn’t just consumed by the user anymore—it’s also consumed by search engines, advertising engines, and a whole bunch of other computer systems that are trying to understand what you’re providing. So it’s no longer just about presentation.
But there are situations where presentation is the only thing that matters. These are “about” pages or what I sometimes call “vanity” pages. They exist for brand information. Sometimes that brand is personal, sometimes it’s a company. And frankly, this is where a lot of websites go wrong—they’re just providing brand information and nothing else.
Take Burger King as an example. Burger King puts information on their website. Do they care if a search engine ever finds it? Not really. Nobody is sitting at home thinking, “I kind of want something fast-food related—let me search and see what comes up,” and then Burger King magically appears and solves that problem. That’s just not how it works.
But Burger King still wants a web presence. It’s branding. It’s presentation. They don’t care about personalization. They don’t care about running ads for other companies on their site. And yet, sometimes we look at big companies and think, “Well, they’re huge. They must know exactly what they’re doing. We should copy this.”
But here’s the key point: that website is not where Burger King makes its money. If their website is bad, hard to use, or even kind of awful, does that stop people from going to Burger King? No. People still go.
This is why we have to split the technology from the product—and even from the company. You can look at the Burger King website, the McDonald’s website, or any number of massive corporations, but you shouldn’t automatically model your own work after theirs unless you’re actually trying to build the same kind of product they are.