What Makes up a Web 2.0 Website Design

Many people outside of the web world, can’t tell the difference between a website design that belongs in the 90’s and a design that competitors are going to cry over.

It’s important that even if you are not tech-savvy, or know a lot about websites/the web, that you don’t let a web company take advantage of you and give you a poor design, which will undoubtedly lead to a poor website.

Web 2.0 can be defined as the web re-invented. Websites are now more interactive and a lot more visually appealing, thanks to the technology that has been deployed over the last few years.

Here are a few crucial elements of a proper web 2.0 design:

Social Media: Did you expect anything but this for the first component? It’s very important that you have a social media strategy in place for your company, and equally important that these social media profiles are easily accessible from your website. Facebook/Twitter activity feeds, Follow/Like buttons, and Social Network icons are just a few ways that you can incorporate social media components into your website. It’s important that these elements flow with the general look and feel of the website. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter make this easy by offering you the means to manipulate how their elements appear on your site, making it hard for you to have a poor excuse if it clashes with your design.

Informative Footers: Footers should no longer just contain a copyright line and company name. Footers have been redefined of late to incorporate many links and information. A great example of this, and an exaggeration, would be Zappos.com. Zappos, arguably the best shopping website on the web today, almost has an entire mini site, in there footer. At the bare minimum, like the footer on this page, you should have a structured list of links for your website, some text (great for SEO), and contact information. Due to this pattern being done over and over, people are getting accustomed to all of this information being on the bottom of every page. It should NOT be at ALL difficult for someone to find a section on your website, get a hold of you, or learn more about you. This information can all be included in the footer in a nicely designed fashion.

Space: If you’ve gone into Best Buy in the past 5 years, you’ll see that monitors are getting bigger and bigger. When you buy a new computer, you are generally going to get a 19 or 20 inch monitor. These large monitors equal a larger viewing area, which equals a larger canvas for you to design your website on. Websites no longer need to be in a teeny tiny space, due to the size of monitors. Your website should now be spaced out nicely with key elements, such as headers, being much larger than they would be in the past.

CSS: One of the biggest changes in designs in the last few years is the strong incorporation of CSS into website designs. To simplify it, CSS allows you to display visual elements, without images. Among many other benefits, this results in much faster overall load time of your website, while not sacrificing visuals at all. It’s important that your new website design is designed with CSS coding in mind. If a designer has no clue of how you plan on coding the site, he/she will generally just do whatever looks best on a pallet. The better designers will automatically design a website with advanced coding, such as CSS and HTML5 in mind. HTML5, another new coding technology, allows you to use flash-like animations, without using flash. Elements such as large, smooth fonts and gradients are just a few components that should be kept in mind when designing a site to be maximized with CSS.

When someone discovers you on the web, your website design is the first impression of your company that someone will get. It’s crucial that your design and website gives the proper reflection of you and your brand. If you are in the business world, you wouldn’t go to a meeting with a self-made tie. If you are a contractor, you wouldn’t go to an estimate wearing a shirt your niece made you. It’s important to understand that your website is a direct reflection of you, and will leave a lasting impression.

Basch Solutions, LLC – a Rochester NY web design company, has been designing web 2.0 websites and building content management systems to power them since the beginning. If you’re in the market for a new website, or just want to ask us some questions, feel free to give us a call. Also, check out our portfolio and see some powerful examples of what we’re capable of!

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