Google Disrupts--Again

Google has turned the advertising industry upside down. Here's something else the Internet giant is changing: Web sites--both how they are used and how Web designers ought to go about putting them together. Chalk it up to another triumph of less being more.

The traditional advice about building a Web site was to spend a lot of time in advance planning its organization, ensuring that all the inside pages fit together in a logical hierarchy. Next, navigation aids were placed on the home page, so that the routes to all that inside content were intuitive and readily apparent. And since first impressions are as important online as off, lots of time and effort should be spent designing the home page, as it would be the first thing your visitors would see.

No one is now saying that Web layouts should be complicated, or Web site design shouldn't be attractive. But because of search engines, users end up never encountering that home page or availing themselves of the careful arrangement of the site's material.

Instead, they're taken directly to the inside page that has the specific material they are looking for. And once they find what they're looking for, they're off somewhere else.

What that means, says Jerry Sheehan of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, is that Web developers shouldn't sweat the details of how a site is pieced together, since Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) will only end up hiding a lot of that work from many, if not most, Web users.

"We are stuck designing for the total user experience," Sheehan says. "But in fact, the actual user experience is to simply come and get something, and then go. The natural predilection is to spend lots of time working on the right design. But we might be better off taking 20% of that effort and using it to come up with 20% more content for the site."

Sheehan's institute helps state agencies get help from academia to undertake technology projects more complex than they could by themselves. He said he developed his new approach to Web design by looking at the traffic on his group's own Web site, and noticing that many visitors came directly from Google to an inside page, without ever bothering to check out the other parts of the site.