I've been developing websites for almost 20 years now. In that time, I've noticed that there are distinct patterns to a particular site's evolution. You are likely familiar with this even if you haven't paid particular attention to it. I've broken this evolution into 5 stages: 1. Introductory, 2. Informational, 3. Interactive, 4. Actionable, and 5. Immersive.
In the last 12 years I've specialize by working with healtcare websites. I've worked for WebMD and ADAM, both of which were leaders in their market segments. I'll keep the examples of the stages to healthcare sites for the sake of this discussion.
Introductory
Introductory websites are like business cards. They have little utility outside of "hello, I'm here." Everyone starts with this type website whether they intent to or not. In the early days of the web, before we figured out what it could really do for us, everyone had to have a presence on the web. Typically this was a single page with a logo, and address and a phone number. We only see these types of pages today while the real site is being developed. At least the "under construction" pages have (mostly) gone away.
Informational
Websites quickly evolved to be more informational. The site grew to include secondary pages with information on goods and services. A large majority of the sites that I saw at ADAM were (are still) in this state. ADAM sold medical content to healthcare websites. Thousands of pages of content helped these websites fill out. A large portion of the healthcare websites out there just don't have the staff to produce large amounts of content, and what they are able to produce gets out of date pretty quickly. ADAM gave them the ability to quickly expand their offerings leaving them to produce only the facility specific information such as staff lists, etc. It wasn't long before people realized that managing all of those pages was very difficult and time consuming. Up until now, most of the first two types of sites were managed by the Marketing Departments. But in order to manage the large amounts of data they would have to turn to more sophisticated systems such as databases and content management systems (I'll write a blog post on CMS's at a later date). This typically required more technological expertise than the marketing team had on staff.
Interactive
Regardless of how the healthcare organization chose to solve their problem, the resultant website became very interactive. These types of sites have lots of locations that consumers can interact. Calendars, class sign ups, mailing lists are all part of the evolution. Most of these systems were still disconnected from existing systems in the healthcare organization and required a lot of work to get data out of one system into another one. But from a consumers point of view, the site had much more utility and allowed them to interact with the organization on a more personal basis. Sadly, most healthcare sites out there today are still in this state. And considering the resources required, it is understandable that they have trouble transcending to the next level. These type of sites are significantly more usable than their earlier evolutionary cousins. However, they still rely on the premise that the consumer will come to them. Outside of newsletters and email lists (both of which require the consumer to opt into the program) there is little way to get in front of the consumer.
Actionable
The next evolutionary step is to connect the data sources more directly and to turn encounters into actions. The way that this is accomplished is to take casual interactions and begin to build consumer profile. This has been referred to as the "Pyramid of Commitment." Once a casual encounter has been turned into an action, it becomes easier to continue to interface with the consumer. EMR's and PHR's play big into this space. The idea is that by helping the consumer manage their health that the organization can continue to have consistent interaction with the patient. Large scale content management systems and EMR's must be able to interact in order to make this work. This has been considered the Holy Grail for some time in healthcare. When I was at WebMD in the late 90's this was our goal. While at ADAM we worked to facilitate that through several of our partners. Unfortunately, not many organizations have achieved this yet. Although many of the existing sites today have components of this, they are still struggling to complete the full idea throughout their site (and ultimately to their organization).
From a consumers perspective, this sounds like what we want. But it relies heavily on a geographic locale and forces the consumer to be forever loyal least they loose their investment into their own data. From the organizations point of view, getting in front of the consumer still requires a lot of effort (the same ways as before, but now with additional touch points by every healthcare provider). Costs for building and maintaining these systems are large and ROI's are hard to come by.
Both Microsoft and Google have attempted to bridge the obvious gap between the consumer and the organization by creating their centralized repository. However most organizations are still hesitant to use such a repository as they feel that they would lose control of their data.
