The site is built on carbonhouse’s Venuelements system, tailored exclusively for major event-driven facilities.

Carhartt, maker of industrial strength clothing, has a new site design. In order to see it, first you get the chance to “blow up” their old design. From the rubble, the new design emerges. Clever! And it’s viral.

It sure beats the awful old practice of putting up an “under construction” page while a new site is being built (we’ve advised against that many times). Even if your current site is less than desirable, it’s better than no presence at all. Still, it’s fun to celebrate when you do take it down and launch fresh.

VenuElements is specifically tailored for venues, facilities and performing arts centers. It currently powers the websites for a number of major facilities around the U.S., including Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, Prudential Center, Sprint Center, Target Center, RBC Center and more.

The idea is that Google is now indexing FOAF files and the XFN microformats to find and display publicly declared relationships between sites. Read the post on the Google Operating System blog for a good summary of how this works.

How linking strategies will evolve to include these self-declared links is unclear, but the idea that they will be indexed does make the effort seem worthwhile. Especially considering meta tags (keywords and descriptions) are ignored by most search engines, making other page elements more relevant. More indexed links theoretically should increase a given site’s popularity. If the “socially tagged” hyperlinks are considered more legitimate vs. meta tags by the search engines, they will indeed take off.