The design and implementation of web sites, in particular complex web sites intended for use by large numbers of users such as mainstream commercial and business web sites, is a complicated and costly process. Because people differ in their tastes, skill levels, and habits, only a fraction of potential users may prefer a given web site design when multiple web site design choices are made available. For example, a simple web site design may be preferred by newcomers, but found to be frustrating to use by experienced users. Or, an extremely visual design may be ideal for users with visual cognitive styles but difficult to use for those with limited vision or with narrative cognitive styles. Known solutions to the problem of varied user characteristics include offering multiple specially-created versions of the web site (at a correspondingly multiplied cost in design and implementation), and allowing users to personalize or customize the visual appearance of the site for themselves and then to store the customized designs on their personal computers (i.e., on the client side of the web). But since most users are not interested in becoming web-site designers and because visual appearance is only one part of the overall site experience, those solutions are of limited benefit.
Low-cost solutions to other Net related and Web related information design problems have been achieved by leveraging user-created design or organizational information. The Google™ search engine, for instance, rather than using a specifically-organized hierarchy of web pages by subject (as attempted by the Yahoo!® and dmoz systems), allows the logical structure of the Web to emerge from the links that page authors create between pages (S. Brin and L. Page, “The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine,” In Proceedings of the 7th World Wide Web Conference, pages 107-117, 1998). The flickr online photo-sharing community uses user-entered “tags” rather than a pre-designed set of categories to allow users to structure the photographs on the site. Various portal sites, such as “Yahoo!®” and “My AOL™”, allow each user to create a personalized “portal” page for which the user selects the set of information items that the page may contain (from a list of preset available items), and selects some aspects of the page's appearance (such as the ordering or placement of the information items, the background color used, and the like); this portal page is presented to the user each time he enters the site. Several existing publications describe mechanisms for site owners to change the content or appearance of their web site, or to allow site users to customize the visual appearance of a page for their own use (see, for instance, Percival—US Published Patent Application No. 2004/0039795, Hewett—US Published Patent Application No. 2002/0103856, Croney—US Published Patent Application No. 2004/0268228, Kowtko—US Published Patent Application No. 2002/0065877, Bier—US Published Patent Application No. 2002/0073125, Hillar—US Published Patent Application No. 2002/0046245, and Robert—US Published Patent Application No. 2003/0065638), or to allow site users to add content to the site (as in “Wiki” style systems; see for instance “Corporate Collaboration with TWiki”, WEB Techniques, v. 5, n. 12, pp. 51-55, December 2000). Some of these known methods include allowing the export in other formats of site content (as in many Wiki-style systems) or of user customization properties (as in Croney—US Published Patent Application No. 2004/0268228). But none of these solutions allow users to create, share, and build collaboration communities around tailored versions of the functional pages of a web site (such as the pages used to select and purchase products, or the pages used to present course materials in an online-learning site).
Other solutions have been of limited scope. Various computer programs such as the WinAmp™ media player and the Mozilla™ web browser allow the user to create and apply “skins” and “plugins” to change the appearance and function of the program, thus effectively offloading some aspects of the program's design onto the user community. This type of “skinning”, however, applies to individual computer programs rather than to web sites. Web browser accessories such as the “Greasemonkey” program for the Mozilla™ web browser allow the user to alter the data that is received from a web site, in order to change the user's experience of the site as viewed through the browser. But because Greasemonkey scripts are stored and applied at the client side, they are negatively impacted by changes to the server-side design of the site (and are therefore much less reliable than tailoring done at the server side), and they are not under the control of the owners of the site.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method of providing tailored web site versions to a requesting user in accordance with one or more criteria, including the web site design skill level of the requesting user.