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mclarke1987
07 May 2009, 05:55 AM
Since this is my first blog post here, my name is Michael Clarke, I’m a freelance website developer and you can check out my own site at [website removed]. In this article I intend to look at internet trends, mostly web 1.0, web 2.0 and the future web 3.0

When the internet was first developed it was intended to be a means of sharing information, this was Web 1.0 it was centered on sharing educational information, research, studies things like that. As it started to expand we saw the way it was used evolving. Designers got flexible & went to extremes with their ideas; the net lost all uniform it once had.

We are currently in the age of Web 2.0, this is a “loose” term used by developers, and some view it as purely a design term, some as a back-end. But what exactly is web 2.0? Firstly Web 2.0 is about the user interface getting information to the user in the simplest manner possible, making things clean and easy to use. The internet is expanding nearly everyone in the world has access to use a computer with the internet, and not all for educational purposes. This is where the “social” side of the internet comes in, that is the key reason why information needs to be simplified & unified once more.

Within web2.0 we’ve seen a few design trends, the first being the major use of widget style boxes for information, keeping the information organized and easy to locate. Another aspect that’s crept in is Footer sitemaps, these are the links in the bottom of a page, but they are there for more than design it’s for seo (search engine optimization) as well. Another thing has crept in and took the internet by storm, those glossy gradients, they are simple to make and they give pages a clean, sleek look which is hugely popular especially in today’s growing market of “social users”.

Now, what is Web 3.0? At this point we can only speculate, but based on the transfer between Web 1.0 being educational; to Web 2.0 being social it would appear we are moving in trend to give the average Joe more control. So in my opinion Web 3.0 will still be clean, simple & uniformed but I feel it will be more of a functionality change, in Web 3.0 I would expect to see a lot more functionality to the end user, whether this be geared towards allowing Customized Networks within a few clicks, the ability to “Cam-Chat” on the current social networking sites. Just allowing the user to share more of themselves at the own discretion.

I started this article with the intention of discussing web trends and so far I’ve only lightly touched each of them so I do feel I’ll need to write more articles in coming weeks to truly explore each of them, as well as this I’ll be starting a Video Blog over on YouTube [account name removed].

I would like to make one last point though, if you’re a client buying a site, make sure your clear on your requirements, if you don’t want a web 2.0 site tell the developer, if you do want one, make sure you mention it. Not all developers are using web 2.0 styles and some do it by default so please be clear. Also provide samples of things you like otherwise their developing in the dark.

Thanks for reading!

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