I had an interesting discussion with a friend last week. In her late 40’s, she recently embarked in a new career in selling real estate. We talked about her digital strategy, and I was rather surprised at how much she already knew about the digital marketing landscape.
As this month marks the 25th birthday of the first public website, I realized what a unique position some of us are in. We have lived through the entire evolution of the modern World Wide Web as adults. We have the ability to understand how the world operated before the advent of the web, as well as be comfortable in the current (2D) web-based world.
The next quarter century promises to bring yet another revolution. Virtual Reality (VR) is here now, and the VR web is racing down the road to reality. Though as Casey Yee, co-creator of Mozilla’s WebVR standards team, states, we’re not there yet.
He reported to FastCoDesign.com, “We’re wondering, what is a link going to look like in VR—the blue underlined link in text works on a page. That’s the status quo. But what does that look like in VR?” Yee asks. “Is it a portal? Is it a bounding box around an object? Do you walk up to it? Do you touch it? There are all sorts of questions around what that looks like in VR.”
So back to current reality – back to my real estate friend. She’s realized that she can take advantage of her unique position in the digital evolution. She understands that older clients need marketing materials that may be vastly different than those of the millennials. She also realizes that those entrenched older real estate agents and brokers who have until now enjoyed first page search engine results, are about to lose their coveted status. They’re being lapped by savvy upstarts who are breathing life into content-rich, fully responsive websites, with a keen eye to search engine optimization (SEO).
What will the next 25 years look like? That’s anybody’s guess. Perhaps as suggested by FastCoDesign.com, it may not exist at all. Instead we’ll all be lured away from a democratic web by the Apples, Googles, and Facebooks of the world – each inventing its own metaverse.
At Designing North Studios, we can help your firm navigate the next quarter century of digital evolution. And we can do it in plain English without all the industry jargon. We get it. We can help you and your firm get it too.
Give us a jingle – we still accept calls from humans – for now.
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