Site Navigation Becoming Less Important

Chris Anderson at the FASTforward07 Conference provided some hard numbers to backup how differently Wired magazine treats the hardcopy edition from the web. The print version is entirely about "what's new", the current issue. On the web "what's new" is losing ground. 40 percent read the archives and that number is rising. Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired. On the web only a minority (22%) of visitors use the navigation to get to an article. 23% use the site search and 28% found content from external search or links from blogs. Links from the home page account for 27%. Anderson's and Wired's conclusions are to mine the archives, to completely forget any notion of being a portal and to foster links from blogs.