Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
  HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html

Designing Your Site for Web 2.0
By Kim Roach (c) 2006

Have you heard it? There's a buzz like never before on the
Internet. Everyone is talking about Web 2.0. If you're like
many people, you may think it's a marketing gimmick and quite
an overused statement. If so, you would be at least partially
right.

Fortunately, there's another side to the story. Underneath all
of the chatter is a concept that is even more powerful than the
hype that surrounds it.

The concept of Web 2.0 started as a conference brainstorming
session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. During
their discussion, they analyzed the companies that had survived
the dot-com collapse. Interestingly enough, many of these
companies had quite a few things in common. Was there a
connection? Was the dot-com crash a turning point for the web?
O'Reilly and MediaLive believed so. And therefore, Web 2.0 was
born.

So, what is it?

Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as:

"The term Web 2.0 refers to a second generation of services
available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and
share information online. In contrast to the first generation,
Web 2.0 gives users an experience closer to desktop applications
than the traditional static Web pages. Web 2.0 applications
often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s,
including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax
(1998), and web syndication (1997). They often allow for mass
publishing (web-based social software). The concept may include
blogs and wikis."

There is no official standard for what makes something
"Web 2.0", but there are certainly a few common attributes
that often describe this new culture of transformation.

You can see many of these concepts in sites like Flickr,
del.icious, Wikipedia, Amazon reviews, and the eBay reputation
system.

Web 2.0 is built on a system of collective knowledge. It
provides a social fabric for the Web, empowering the individual
and giving them an outlet for their voice to be heard.

However, we have only seen a small glimpse of the effects of
these new transitions. Del.icio.us and Digg are just the
beginning of what will soon become a much more interactive Web.

Each day there are a variety of new online applications being
released: online spreadsheets, online word processing, to-do
lists, reminder services, and personal start pages.

In addition, many of the changes that are evident in the
world of Web 2.0 can be seen through common design practices.
Old-school HTML was full of boxes and square tables. Today's web
designers are rapidly moving away from boxy designs to flexible
curves. When designing for today's Internet, it's all about
rounded designs, nice big text, gradients, glassy effects, and
bright colors.

Rounded Corners:

Let's face it. The days of good 'ol tables and square boxes are
good and gone. The Web 2.0 era has ushered in the pleasing sight
of rounded corners.

Unfortunately, many web masters have spent unending hours trying
to obtain perfectly rounded corners. Their pain and suffering
has led to a number of tutorials that will help us bypass the
grief.

Below are some links to tutorials that will get you started
creating your very own rounded corners:

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/
css-round-corners-boxes.shtml
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/mountaintop/
http://www.web-20-workgroup1-swicki.eurekster.com/rounded+corners/

Nice Big Text:

Have you ever been to a web site where you could barely read the
text? Well, join the club. Fortunately, times have taken a turn
for the better. With Web 2.0, oversized fonts have come into
style. You can start using plenty of oversized text to make
important messages stand out. Of course, you don't want all of
the text on your web site to be supersized, but make sure that
the most important text on the page is bigger than normal text.

You can see some examples at:

http://www.corkd.com/
http://www.blurb.com

Gradients:

Gradients are another popular design element of Web 2.0. This is
especially true of backgrounds. A common background used today
has a gradient at the top, fading down to some other color that
continues throughout the background for the rest of the page.

For a complete tutorial on how to create this type of effect, go
to http://www.photoshoplab.com/web20-design-kit.html.

Colors:

Web 2.0 sites are strongly defined by their colors. They nearly
always use bright and cheery colors - lots of blue, orange, and
lime green.

They also often include large, colorful icons, sometimes with
reflections and drop shadows. To see some samples of how web
sites are effectively using bright colors, check out:

http://www.9rules.com/
http://www.iconbuffet.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/

Other common design characteristics include the use of tabs,
reflections, glassy effects, large buttons, and big text boxes
for submission forms.

Sites that are embracing Web 2.0 can also often be identified by
their tag clouds. If you have traveled the web much in the last
6 months, then you have surely seen tag clouds. They are used
prominently on del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr. A tag cloud
is basically a visual depiction of the conent on a website. Often
times, more popular tags are shown in a larger font.

Why not add a tag cloud to your own site? Not only do they look
cool, but they also provide your visitor with a search tool that
helps them to find your content quickly and easily.

You can create your own tag cloud with a very simple service
called Eurekster Swicki (http://swicki.eurekster.com/). This is
a community-based search engine that creates free tag clouds for
web sites.

Although we have discussed many of the design elements associated
with Web 2.0, this change is much more than just an aesthetic
transition. Web 2.0 is essentially about a transition in the way
we experience the Internet. The new Ajax programming base allows
web masters to create an architecture of participation for their
users. Web 2.0 refers to the ongoing transition to full
participation on the Web.

Your web site can be so much more than an information resource.
Your web presence is a place. With the proper programming skills,
you can create a virtual world complete with an online shopping
mall that compares prices from a variety of merchants, looks for
potential coupons, and displays Amazon reviews.

In addition, traditional desktop applications are rapidly
becoming available online as a service. Why not offer your
visitors the ability to create their own to-do lists, online
note pads, reminder services, and personal start pages?

Create an experience, not just a site.
================================================================
Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews
(http://www.sitepronews.com) and SEO-News (http://www.seo-news.com)
newsletters. You can contact Kim at: kim @ seo-news.com

This article may be freely distributed without modification and
provided that the copyright notice and author information remain
intact.
================================================================

Copyright © 2006 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.