A lot of voices are rising up to proclaim the death of the traditional website. For example, in a list of “10 Web Trends That Should Die in 2006,” the Google Blogoscoped blog suggests...

I hope in 2006, major companies who are still on the web 1.0 train will upgrade to the world of blogs, podcasts, RSS, etc., and replace their ???homepages??? with it.

There are, to be sure, any number of corporate sites that could benefit from adding blogs, podcasts, and RSS to their sites (not to mention wikis and other social media). There may even be some traditional websites that can stand to migrate entirely to one of these platforms. Amy Gahran, for example, offers a very rational explanation of why her “borchureware” website was better envisioned as a blog. My podcasting co-host Neville Hobson has never had a website to market his services; his online presence is entirely contained within his blog, NevOn. I even plan to tap into the power of my blogging application, Expression Engine, to convert my website so it’s easier to maintain and more tightly integrated with my blog. (Not that my website, powered by PHPWebSite, is all that difficult to maintain.)

Still, the notion that all websites would be better off as blogs is yet another case of overzealous enthusiasts getting carried away. There is plenty of valuie to the traditional hieracrhical website. What kind of site you offer your audiences depends on the purpose you have in mind for it. In other words, strategy should precede tactic. “We need a website; let’s do it as a blog!” is no basis for sound decision-making. Establishing connections through a blog is one terrific goal. Providing quick access to information customers want or need through well-planned information architecture is another. Great as blogs are, they’re not a marvel of information management. After all, they are charaterized by a reverse-chronological-order structure.

Take technical support, for example. I would much rather click through two or three links on a navigationally sound site to find an answer than stumble through searches and categories on a blog. Of course, a technical support blog would certainly enhance and improve any tech support site, but would be a miserable replacement. The blog would keep users up to date on new issues and problems; the hierarchical site would allow users to drill quickly to archived information they need to solve their problems. I’m a huge fan, for example, of Macromedia’s tech support site, which breaks its offerings into clear categories that include the ability to participate in user forums and subscribe to RSS feeds.

Product-oriented sites, like Hewlett-Packard’s, would also be far less usable as a blog. This is one of many sites that has figured out user-driven navigation, with primary links based on what the user is looking for, not how the company or its product line is organized. And imagine turning briliantly conceived media relations sites like General Electric’s and investor relations sites like FedEx’s into blogs and wikis. By all means, add social media elements such as blogs and RSS to these sites, but replace them? How about, instead, using the tool that best achieves your goals?

Philipp Lenssen, author of the Google Blogoscoped blog, is one of those guys who sells hammers, hence seeing every problem as a nail. (I know, I know, I keep using this hackneyed old metaphor, but it works, so what the hell.)

Lenssen offers a couple other points in his 10 trends post with which I disagreed. For example, he wants long articles to appear on a single page, suggesting that “continued” buttons aren’t intuitive and splitting the article in multiple pages harms Google indexing. While I agree that “turn page” is no way to produce copy, we also know that readers won’t scroll endlessly. Context-independence, such as that practiced at WebMonkey, still makes sense. For instance, in an article about podcasting, separate pages are dedicated to discrete topics, such as creating and finding content, recording and mixing, and publishing and syndicating. As for ensuring the article is indexed appropriately in search engines, you could always do what Webmonkey does: provide a printable version in which all the pages are stitched together.

Lenssen would also have organizations dismiss users of low bandwidth, even though they represent nearly half the consumers in the country. You should know your audience, and if they’re dialing in, you dismiss them at your peril.

Bottom line: Let strategy, not tactics, drive your online decisions.