Today's Web 2.0

In today’s Web 2.0 world things are a lot different than they were when the first website was considered to be published almost twenty years ago. In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee was the first to combine Internet communication of that time (both email and Usenet) with the early days of hypertext (which soon became HTML) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_design). As web design and the Web itself further progressed I remember the first web page I created in elementary school, and how I was jealous of pages online who were using table layouts for frames. By the time I picked up web design in high school (at the Livonia Career center) and actually learned how to use tables correctly, it was no longer the norm. The World Wide Web had moved on the bigger and better things such as Macromedia Flash, Cascading Style Sheets, and JavaScript.

With the advancement in web browsers over the last few years; including the redistribution of the web browser market share, and the increasing browser support of W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (which includes recommendations on everything from HTML, CSS, DOM, to XML), the World Wide Web has changed. Now in the Web 2.0 world web design has began to become a science based on statistics and real life testing, and has started to stray from fancy web design and all-flash websites. Web designers are now focused in making web sites with a clear purpose, and using this clarity to increase website conversion rates: the process of getting users to do what you want them to on your website.

This can be different for each site. Some sites may want users to simply join their product mailing list; others may want you to register for a specific web-based product or actually order their real life product and have it shipped to your house. Whatever the purpose may be, there is now specific data that has been collected which leads to a certain set of criteria each web designer should now try and implement into their web sites to increase their conversion rate.